By Easy
easy@easygrowsit.com
February 24nd, 2013
If you, like many of us, grow lots of tomato plants for your garden
every year, you start them from seed. Starting from seed can be tedious,
time consuming and sometimes quite frustrating. You have to plan ahead
so your little crop is ready to plant when the time is right. This
usually means starting your seeds from 6-8 weeks before it’s time to
plant them in the garden.
To start our seeds, some of us use 10″ x 20″ trays with cells for
each seed. Others use anything from solo cups to microwave dishes from
their last frozen dinner. It doesn’t matter what you grow them in,
you’ll need to make sure they always get the proper amount of water,
light and warmth to start them right. It requires a certain amount of
attention at this stage and mistakes can set you back to the point of
having to start over. Forget to water your little tomato plants and you
could end up with plants that are stunted or dead and you could have to
start all over.
At some point in the process, you’ll need to transplant the little
seedlings into larger containers at least once. Depending on how large
you want them at planting time, maybe twice. As I said above, it can get
a little tedious and time consuming, especially if you’re doing the
same with other plants like peppers at the same time.
The obvious alternative to growing tomato plants from seeds is to go
buy small plants from a local nursery or home improvement store just
before you need to put them out in the garden. Depending on how many
plants you need, it can be quite expensive. If I remember correctly,
last year the price of small tomato plants at home improvement stores
were about US$3.50 each in 4 inch pots. If you bought a dozen plants,
you were looking at around $42 plus tax. How many tomatoes would it take
to make up for a $42 investment? That’s assuming all your plants
survived to produce tomatoes.
So, starting tomatoes from $1.50 worth of seeds is easily more
economical although much more risky and difficult. Buying plants
somewhere is much less risky but much more expensive. What if I told you
that you could have the benefits of both choices without the huge
monetary outlay and without having to monitor dozens of baby plants from
seed? Would that be something that might interest you? If it is, please
read on.
For those of you that do not know much about tomatoes and tomato
plants, let me give you a little background information before I move
on. Tomatoes are actually a fruit, not a vegetable. I, like many, was
not aware of this fact for quite some time and I was quite surprised to
hear that. Tomato plants are actually vines, unlike, say, a bell pepper
plant, which is technically a tree.
Vines are interesting plants. Some if not most vines (I don’t claim
to be a vine expert or any kind of expert for that matter) will sprout
roots when buried in soil. More roots means more water and nutrients for
the plant as well as having a stronger base in the ground to support
the plant. You can actually plant a tomato plant, with proper
preparation, horizontally in a trench leaving just the very top of the
tomato plant sticking out of the ground. It will develop many more roots
than with the typical planting method and it will be much more strongly
rooted in the ground as well. This is called the trench planting
method. If you’d like to see exactly how this works, here’s a link to a
You Tube video my friend Bobby (
Mhpgardener on You Tube) did showing how it’s done…
Planting Tomatoes – A Quick Tip
Tomatoes grow new baby plants at the intersection where a branch and
the main stem meets. This intersection is typically called a crotch and
the new baby plant that develops there is usually called a sucker. I am
sure there is probably a more scientific name but gardeners usually call
it a sucker because it takes energy away from the main plant to grow
this new baby plant. Remember, a tomato plant is a vine and vines like
to spread all over. Some tomato growers remove these suckers and others
like to leave them on. I’ll leave that subject for another article.
Picture of a sucker growing from a tomato plant courtesy of mhpgardener of You Tube.
At this point, you might be saying to yourself, “This is all very
interesting and good but what does all this have to do with how I get a
bunch of tomato plants to plant in my garden?” I appreciate your
patience dear reader and now that I have explained enough background
information, let’s get to the point.
Suckers, as I said, are baby tomato plants. It’s like a another
tomato plant growing out of the main tomato plant, which is called the
mother plant. If you would snip off a decent sized sucker (six inches
long or longer with a few full sets of leaves) from the mother plant and
stick the bottom of the sucker in water, in a matter of three days to a
couple of weeks, depending on the variety of tomato plant, you should
see roots develop under and at the water line. Once they start to
develop roots, those roots will grow at a very rapid rate. This is
called “rooting” a plant. It’s also called “cloning”.
After the roots get a few inches long (don’t let them get too out of
hand) you can transplant the new tomato plant into soil and it will grow
like any other tomato plant in soil. Now, the really amazing as well as
useful part of this whole process is that not only does the new sucker
derived plant give you a whole new plant to grow, it doesn’t know it’s a
new plant. To it, it’s a fully developed tomato plant, not a 6 week old
baby plant that grew from seed and is still maturing. If the mother
plant is three months old, the sucker is just as mature, just smaller.
It’s ready to put on flowers and start bearing fruit right away unlike
it’s six week old, grown from seed counterpart.
So now, let’s put it all together. If you needed a dozen or so tomato
plants, instead of planting twelve seeds 6-8 weeks ahead of time, you
could grow one or two mother plants a month or two earlier than that so
they have suckers a few weeks before you needed plants to put in the
garden. Not only will the sucker derived plants be more mature and ready
to start producing right away, you’d be using less seeds and can still
get more suckers later from the mother plant in case something terrible
happens to your garden such as hail storm. The mother plant will
continue to keep making suckers for you in case you need them.
I almost forgot! There’s another reason to generate plants this way.
Not only will the mother plant give you lots of baby plants, chances
are, depending on when you started your mother plant, it will also give
you tomatoes as well by the time you start setting your new plants out
in the garden.
Don't forget to check out Dale's
You Tube channel &
Web site..
Have a great one all
: )»
