Perennial Tomato Experiment!

[Scoot]

Still going strong:

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I can see a sideshoot on that plant

I have a little sideshoot/armpit that I planted in a pot on my window cill. It's actually got some tiny flowers growing, they aren't out yet but they might be by next month. It's only 4 inches high lol but looks fine still.

[Thelma Sanders]

I have a few tomato plants still fruiting in the GH

All my remaining tomatoes split after freezing on the night we went down to -3C, they went in a casserole that day to use them up!

Now time for a big clear out in there.


I've got 2 plants growing slowly in the spare bedroom, and another rooted armpit on the kitchen windowledge.

[Bigmallly]

I can see a sideshoot on that plant

I have a little sideshoot/armpit that I planted in a pot on my window cill. It's actually got some tiny flowers growing, they aren't out yet but they might be by next month. It's only 4 inches high lol but looks fine still.

Take the flowers off Scoot, you want the plant to grow, not fruit.

[Scoot]

Take the flowers off Scoot, you want the plant to grow, not fruit.

Good point, I'll do just that!

[cheapskate chaz]

So, no further results? I wondered why they produce seeds... Now to next year, I have kept one Tigerrella plant that had re-shooted after I cut it back, and that was before I read this thred, it`s now about 4" high and in the unheated greenhouse, I occasionally water it and might fleece around it if there`s any frost coming, I`ll go take a pic so I can compare later.
My concern is that you might just hibernate blight in your pots/beds with out realising it.
My friend Anne, the Tomatoe queen round these parts, always starts afresh and with some new varieties. She starts propagating seeds in Jan` and never fails to produce a good harvest well before me,indoors,greenhouse, polytunnel and outside in pots! so I`m taking a leaf out of her book and propagate early. If enough is grown and harvested then there will be no need to take up plant space over winter, that`s my thought anyway.

[veggiechicken]

.........Where's the fun in doing it by the book, though?
Gardeing and life should be full of experiment

[cheapskate chaz]

.........Where's the fun in doing it by the book, though?
Gardeing and life should be full of experiment

Result of the experiment(s).....

[Zelenina]

When I worked in Czechoslovakia (as it was then), I visited a vineyard where they unhooked the vines from their wires every winter and laid them on the ground. They covered them in straw/dried bracken and then piled about 18" of manure on top. The vines spent all winter like this, often under a covering of snow at temperatures many degrees below zero. I have often wondered if toms/peppers etc would respond to this treatment but of course the vines had lost all their leaves before they were laid down.

That's interesting marchogaeth. Which part of Czechoslovakia was it? I haven't seen that done in the vineyards in my part of Slovakia. In fact the grapevines I've seen here all have a thick woody stem, and the vine part grows from the top of it in the spring, so I don't it would be possible to lay them down. Certainly the three old vines in my garden don't get any special treatment and they survive the winters OK. But it is one of the warmest parts of Slovakia.

[sparrow100]

I knew my care was hit and miss. I am down to 1 Crimson Crush for overwintering and it is going limp and yellow. Am going to give a foliar Epsom salts spray and check I've not gone too heavy on the watering.

[Zelenina]

My house is L-shaped with a glazed verandah (called here a ganok) all along the inside of the L. It's a good place for starting off and overwintering stuff. Last winter I successfully kept a Tiger Tom tomato plant in it, and it produced some fruit very early this year which I got some seeds from. That was all I wanted from it as it's a rare HSL variety.

This winter my ganok is full of pepper plants and a few tomatoes I'm trying to overwinter. They are ones that never made it out into the garden in the summer for various reasons, and most are small due to still being in small pots, but I have one big straggly Paul Robeson plant in a big pot. So far the peppers are mostly doing better than the toms.

I also dug up a few aubergine plants and potted them up just after the first mild frost here. Their leaves are all dead but the stems look as if they could be still alive.

[bramble]

I have one armpit plant growing well, one seedling tom that I found growing in a bucket so I potted it up, and I have one tomato plant cut down and covered up with newspaper, fleece and bubble wrapped on the outside. So we will wait and see. Its a long way to spring.

[veggiechicken]

I've just found some seedling tomatoes in the GH that have grown from a fallen off tomato.
How amazing is that. Tomato seeds germinating in December in an unheated GH

[Bigmallly]

Update!

It's been a while since I put an update on but this is the plant I brought indoors on 24th October 2015. The intention was to use it as a surrogate for this years plants. So far I've had 7 armpits rooted and currently in the greenhouse, it's still going strong so will just let it do it's thing & will nip off any flowers as they show.

[veggiechicken]

Well done BM
None of mine have survived the winter, not even the seedlings that germinated in the GH in December
Have to rely on this year's sedlings!

[AkionTotocha]

You all got me wondering what the biggest tomato plant in the world is...

This one!