Video Transcipt: Growing Last Year Tomato
I will be looking at an experiment I did growing tomato from last season into the new season.
We’re at the ending of winter so most of us are looking at different types of plants and most of us will have tomatoes in our garden. That’s one of the main crop people normally grow, so I have lots of tomatoes started. I have different stages of tomatoes, if you’ve been following me you know I’ve been planting tomatoes from like mid-January. Okay so I have lots of tomatoes at various stages and this is one I’ve just repot this morning to have tomatoes coming up.
So these are some of the re-pot tomatoes. Then I have tiny tomatoes that were sewn just recently and you can see them coming up. So that’s fine but last year I had so much tomato, all grown from seed and then in early November when I went to the polytunnels they were still looking beautiful. So it got me thinking I don’t want to just cut them up and then compost them. So I said okay I’m going to look for some of the shoots, the sucker between the tomato the side shoot, so I determined to look for the healthiest one and try and experiment.
So I think this one was a beefsteak tomato, I’m not quite sure so I have to wait until it bears to know, to see what it produces but I think it was a big steak tomato. So I just took off one of the shoots and I stick it in some soil. I don’t even have the old pot I stick it in some soil and I put it on the windowsill so if you look it’s looking a bit droopy, but that’s okay it’s from last year and it’s almost a year old so it’s looking a bit droopy. But I’m not going to focus on that, I’m focusing on this bit tomato, isn’t that just beautiful. So it wasn’t on a heated mat it wasn’t on a grow light it was just by the windowsill in the kitchen and the thing is my kitchen doesn’t have any heating.
So there was freezing cold throughout the winter. So apart from when I’m cooking and it’s warm so all of this new shoot I hope you can see properly. All of those new shoots will die back eventually you can see it’s looking droopy and so on, but these are what will produce some lovely tomato this year.
I enjoyed it and this is a successful experiment with this tomato plant, so I’m thinking I’m going to look now to see if the new tomatoes that I’ve planted versus the old tomato from last year will fruit first. So instead of buying seed every year, you can grow tomatoes from the plant so you don’t have to keep buying. Sometimes when the summer is finished and before the frost, some of the plants are still looking okay-ish they don’t look totally gone.
So what I’m planning to do from now on seeing that the experiment was successful is to literally take off the side shoots every year and store it indoors. The other thing I’ve been looking for is a disease, does it have more disease through the season, did it stay healthy? Or will it stay healthy for the entire duration of the season some I will be looking continually through the year and I will be commenting and updating you guys throughout the season to see if my lovely over a year old tomato perform just as good, better or worse than my present season tomato?
I’m excited I’m going to take you on the journey throughout this summer to see which one fruit first. See if there are any disease issues with it, see if there’s a growth issue with it. Monitor and comment on the plants and update you guys. We can see exactly what happened when we take a tomato from the previous season into the new season.
Aren’t you excited about this year? Yes, I am so that’s my mini update on the experiment of my tomato plant that was successful. If you have ever tried any plant it could be peppers, tomatoes anything that you have over winter that was successful and then produced. How was it for you? Let me know and then next year autumn we can try this together again. Because you will see all of my updates this year and you know exactly what happened. So yes we can overwinter tomatoes and get a nice healthy tomato shoot for the new season.
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