Off Grid Living / Camping > Gardening

Trying to grow Upside-Down Tomatoes

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kurt:
woofer do you know that if you accidentally break the stem off a tomato plant you can just bury as much of the broken off stem in fertile soil water in well and most the time it will reroot itself?? if you want to get picky you can get some "rooting powder" for $10 dip the end in that before you plant it or use some stale milk if you like. but it works often enough with nothing at all that is is worth a shot.

actually you can clone your tomato plants the same way just take a cutting and plant it in good soil keep it watered until it starts to grow. some people like to carefully shave the skin off the part you want to root with a razor before planting, use rooting powder, etc. but it works quite often just sticking it in the ground and watering it in.

works for most plants in the nightshade family.

jlt:
I did grow 2 of those last year . One of the stems broke from the wind . and the other one had some tomatoes on it but not as many as the one planted next to it in a 5 gallon bucket setting on the ground.

 THe upside down one had to be watered twice as often.

In my opinion they are not worth the trouble.  JLT

WooferHound:
It's been 3 weeks since I replanted my new Upside-down tomato plant. The new plant is doing much better than the previous plant that I accidentally destroyed. It's probably doing good because it was a bigger plant to start with, and it is planted "deeper" in the bucket with the rootball near the top surface of the soil.

The growing roots and weight of all the dirt and water is making the plastic bucket expand, this is causing the dirt to settle lower and the sides of the bucket are expanding at the top away from the soil. this is making it easy for water to bypass the topsoil and trickle down the sides instead of soaking through the dirt. I really need to wrap some wire or something around the bucket to stop this expansion from getting worse.

Y'all are right about it needing more water, I water this plant twice as often as my ground based garden. When I planted it, I used potting soil to cover the plant, then topped it off with my regular Clay dirt. This seems to create a hard seal at the surface and helps prevent too much evaporation while still letting the water seep through.



It's interesting to see how the plant behaves as it is still trying to grow Up. I have a few tomatoes already getting started, one of them is about the size of a quarter. Member jlt said he lost some plants to the wind, I had a storm blow through 2 weeks ago that had me concerned that it may get broken but it came out just fine. Seems that it still needs some kind of tomato cage.

Kurt mentioned that you can easily root tomato cuttings. I was wondering if I could center a tomato plant in the bucket of dirt with leaves and stems coming out both above the dirt and below the bucket. Could I get the same plant to grow out of the top -and- the bottom?

Of course this is just an experiment, I have backup, If it doesn't produce enough tomatoes, there are 11+ more plants in the ground and now starting to produce some rosey red soup starters.

mobile_bob:
only on topic because it is about tomato's

last year was i think the 2nd hottest year in recorded history here, and almost everyone lost their tomato's.

one that had excellent results watered them an hour before work in the am, an hour at lunch break and another hour at night before bed... he had enormous plants and more tomato's than anyone had ever seen.

lesson learned by me, tomato's like water, and the hotter it is the more they like, so .... its started out this spring to be overly warm again
and i have been watering the crap out of them.

not satisfied i fertilized with 13/13/13 from coop, a nice size handful scraped into the soil of each plant... everyone told me it would burn them down!  it didn't.... so i waited a couple weeks and did it again, and then 2weeks i repeated the process... no damage nice dark green plants that were growing like hell...

so i got a problem in that there is no walking room between the plants, it is a forest of plants and blooms, so i read up on pruning and went at it for 4 days straight, and when i was done they looked like death warmed over... night quite charlie browns xmas tree but close.

three days later they exploded!  now about a week and a half later they are back to being a solid jungle, now nearly 6 ft tall, and loaded with tomato's.

its as if i pissed them off and they are going to bury me!

i got 71 plants, everything from hybrids to heirlooms, cherry to slicers, modern to old world germans, and they all responded the same.

my soil is mostly clay, hardly any humus, first year in over two decades since broken out of sod, so i can't say it is the soil.

next year i will be planting maybe 10 plants, it is turning out to be more of a project in forest management and not a hobby anymore.

this is my first garden in about 30 years too.

so what have i learned?
i like 13/13/13 fertilizer, lots of water, and heavy pruning.

still got over three months before first frost! 

anyone needing tomato's stop on by

bob  g

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