TOMATOES REPOTTED



It's only 16 days since I bought three different tomato plants: Alicante, Italian Plum, and Gardener's Delight.  They soon outgrew their original little pots and I put them into bigger ones, as you can see below.  On sunny but windy days I was still able to protect them in the mini-greenhouse, top deck.  I bring them in at night and they have been growing quite nicely, and rapidly.  In fact, they started to get rather tall and needed staking so, today, I put them into big pots (bottom image) which will be where they remain.  I plan to get the pelargoniums out of the mini-greenhouse very shortly and try a little experiment.  If I remove the wire shelves from the mini-greenhouse then I would think that at least two tomato plants could be stood on the bottom of the greenhouse and grow up past the shelf slats.  It's pointless, I think, my trying to grow Italian Plum and Gardener's Delight completely outdoors.  I understand that Alicante might be more tolerant of outdoor conditions. 

Although these pots look big, they aren't as big as I would wish.  What I will do is place a tomato grow-bag in the bottom of the mini-greenhouse with holes cut out of the plastic the size of the base of the pots.  I will then stand the pots in the grow-bag so that the roots can go through the bottom of the pots and spread out into the grow-bags.  That's the theory and I have heard of it being done a few times. 

Another thing I did when repotting the tomatoes this time is to remove a few of the lower leaves by carefully snapping them off from the main stem (without tearing the stem) and I planted the tomato plants deeply in the soil.  The little 'hairs' that you see on tomatoes will turn into roots if they come in contact with soil.  The idea is that the plentiful roots will help the tomato plant to feed, taking in water and nutrients. 

To be honest, I'm not over confident about growing tomatoes the way the weather is going.  Last year I tried growing this kind of tall tomato and the yield was almost nothing.  I've grown Tumbling Toms before, successfully, but that was in a fairly decent summer a couple of years back and I don't like the way they tend to sprawl out. 

As for vegetable growing, I'm not bothering with anything else this year other than the strawberries, loganberries and, of course the Prunus Avium Stella cherry tree which I bought a week or so ago. 

Alicante, Gardener's Delight, and Italian Plum tomatoes