Monday, June 29, 2009

Recovery

After the hail storm, I took a bunch of cuttings of my tomatoes and thought I'd share a down and dirty how-to.

First thing is to identify a prime bit of broken tomato that you'd like to salvage. Branches work just as well as main stems, so pick a bit that has most of its leaves intact and minimal bruising on the stem. The piece I chose was a sucker from the main tomato plant.

You can see how the stem was broken and pretty much destroyed. Above all of the breaks, though, was a fairly sturdy vine. This is where I chose to cut.


Now that all of the decision making has been done and you've committed to a cut, the easy part comes. Plop that puppy into a pot. Since tomatoes root along the stems, I like to put a couple of inches (depending on the size of the cutting) under ground. This'll give you a pretty solid root mass in a shorter period of time.


I laid the bottom of the cutting across the potting soil in a 1 gallon pot. I bent the top of the vine upwards and packed potting mix around the stem. I watered thoroughly and gave the little puppy a squirt of Superthrive for added punch.

And this is what it looks like a week later!

Several of the cuttings are flowering and showing signs of greenies again. What a relief!

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Oh hail.

You heard right! HAIL.

About a week ago, we had a normal, everyday thunderstorm that dropped a nice bucket of hail all over my growing plantation. I'd just gotten the Florida weave rocking, and everything was beaten down quite nicely. Entertainingly, our roof, two miles away, survived without a dent. Drat!

We went over to survey the damage, and I took long cuttings from about half of the plants and have them going at home. They're doing pretty well, so I hope we'll be back in gear (albeit extremely behind schedule!) shortly.

Talk about taking the wind outta someone's sale. Mother nature, sometimes you royally stink. I wish they had home growers' crop insurance!!

Tutorial on how to take tomato cuttings should be up soon. ;)