Tuesday 26 June 2012

Tomato Flowers (and maintenance)

I've been a bit lax on this blog recently as the motivation to do it has been lacking due to things happening in my life...

But I have still been doing bits and bobs around the garden and maintaining the plants (which are growing well).

I'll try and get a full photo shoot done this evening (if it isn't pissing it down) and update later with how everything is coming on, but this post is a quick update about the tomato plants.

They FINALLY have flowers!

The plants outside are behind the ones inside (obviously) so this post is entirely about the inside plants.

There are about 10-15 of these flowers now across the 4 plants that have them showing :)

Another thing that I have been doing is pruning the plants; removing the suckers that grow in the crooks between main trunk and branch.

You do this to keep the main trunk strong, avoid nutrients, water and sugar being diverted away from the fruits, and to stop the plant becoming "bushy".

Here is an example of a sucker that has grown on one of the plants.

I have pinched it off as close to the stem as possible.

This will now go into the compost.

I have had reports from some people who I gave plants to that they are seeing fruit developing already; how jealous am I! Fingers crossed the sun comes out and these plants accelerate again and produce a good crop of tasty tomatoes.


5 comments:

  1. I forgot to prune, thus far - oops. Got flowers (and fruit) on one variety of the ones outside.

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    1. Also - have been experimenting with grow-bag vs regular compost & clay pot. Grow-bag is ahead by about 50%.

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    2. Haha yeah this was the first time I'd pruned; some of the suckers were MASSIVE...

      Yeah, I'm entirely regular compost; my experiment is with inside/outside in pots/outside in hanging baskets.

      The recent storms have battered the hanging baskets though :)

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  2. You cover me with shame. I haven't pruned my tomatoes yet. Task for this evening I think.

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  3. I had no idea that these 'suckers' even existed, much less that I had to prune them. A quick visual inspection of my hanging basket tomato plant reveals that the 'suckers' are by far and away the most prolific budders (and hopefully fruiters), so obviously I'm reluctant to prune these beauties. Perhaps I've misidentified the 'suckers', I'll have a proper route-around latter. :-)

    Loving the blog, it's proving to be a good source of advice/information to a novice like me. How is the corn going by the way? Interested to see if you can get a good yield of anything beyond baby corn. :-)

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