Gardenering

Garden-er-ing- The act of doing a thing and it occurs in and around the garden. Activities surrounding the planting, nurturing, harvesting and cleaning up in and around the Garden.
 



 


Lots of things go into gardenering. Lots of experimenting, questioning, googling, and lots of errors. Hopefull some things here can be helpful.
 

Howdy!

Second Tomatoes

Sooner or Later your beautiful green brilliant tomato plants will start to look like the pictures on the “What’s Wrong With My Tomatoes?” page. It’s just one of those things. Your gorgeous plants are off to the burn pile (I don’t put any tomato parts in the compost heap anymore- it is a disease vector for future tomatoes) Around here we can burn or if you are inclined, you can make a separate pile away from your garden or dispose of the debris at  your local landfill.

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A few years ago I tried an experiment. Rather than completely dig up my plants I cut almost all of the old, diseased parts of the plants.  I notice that most indeterminate tomatoes (this won’t work with determinate, sorry) will make suckers and toward the end of the season I leave the ones that come from the bottom of the bush.
The suckers will thrive once they are uncovered and they have an established root system already.  They seem to really start growing and in no time at all we have a new fresh green untarnished tomato bush.

 

 


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You can see the sucker on this old plant.
(Brandywine Heirloom)

With the old stuff removed the plant grows quickly.

This sucker had a head start.
(Hillbilly Heirloom)

Soon….your mileage may vary.

 


A couple of things to keep in mind. Sometimes there is no sucker.  I have had success cutting a top branch (one  that hasn’t gone bad) and punched it into the ground at the bottom of the plant. Sometimes that works! The other thing that will affect your success is the length of your growing season. Here in US Zone 8a we can have long  days and warmth needed to grow tomatoes into late September.

 

 

Last season I cut down the last of the second tomatoes in October and put the remaining green fruit into a bucket. Most of them ripened and we were able to have home grown tomatoes into December!