Tomato trickery

Despite all the rain lately, baby birds are chirping in their nests (there’s a family of swallows under the eaves of our local dairy that my daughter and I say hello to every weekend), the bees are busy – and every time I try to hunker over my desk to do some work, I get an irresistible urge to sneak out to the office garden to check if the tomato plants have grown (no change since 10am – go figure).

The sad thing is I’ve just come back from a week away with the family – and before I left what I looked forward to most was returning to see how much the toms had grown in my absence!

Yep, tomato season is a satisfying time, and they must be one of the most rewarding and easy plants to grow – all you need is soil, sunlight and water. Though I have discovered some neat tricks lately: this year I’ve tripled the number of plants we have without any extra cost.

You know how you’re supposed to pinch off the ‘laterals’ on tomato plants to make them grow nice and tall? Well, as I’ve pulled off these shoots I’ve simply popped them into a container of water for a few weeks until the shoots have grown their own little roots. From there you just plant them in their own sunny spot and hey presto, you’ve got a whole new plant.

The nice thing about this trick is your crop is staggered – so just as your oldest plants start giving up the ghost, your younger ‘clones’ should be yielding decent fruit.

Laterals, by the way, are those shoots that sprout from the ‘armpits’ of tomato plants – the joins where the branches come off the stems. Any growth you find in that join (that isn’t a cluster of flowers) should be pinched off to promote upward growth – but my advice now is to let them get a bit longer before you pinch, so they turn into decent-sized plants for cloning.

By the way, I mentioned in the last newsletter that I’d tried burying terracotta pots filled with water as a way of irrigating lettuces, and I can report that it definitely works. The lettuce seedlings closest to the pots have thrived on the constant moisture that leaches through the terracotta, while those further away have struggled when it’s dry.

Catch you soon.

Greg Roughan
Editor, Green Ideas magazine

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