Last year, I planted my tomato seedling in the ground and that was it - I gave it plenty of water and sunlight and didn't touch it until it started bearing fruit. Big mistake. I didn't prune it in the slightest. I let it grow and grow and grow until it was more than six and a half feet tall. It was out of control - and started producing fruit much faster than I could pick it. The roots grew half way across my backyard - the branches seemed to plant themselves back into the ground.
Near the end of its life, I was so sick of crawling through branches and leaves to pick just-out-of-reach tomatoes, that I pretty much gave up. Many poor tomatoes ended up falling on the ground to ferment.
In the last six months or so I have read up about pruning techniques and, though I no longer have a garden bed, I am hoping that my plant will still produce massive amounts of fruit...just not so much that it goes to waste. This year, I have planted two varieties (Apollo and Sweet Bite) - both are currently staked and both will eventually be encased in trellises. I plan to weigh my bounty and calculate the amount of money my tomatoes cost per kilo, compared to what they cost in supermarkets.
This is my plant when it was only about three feet high - it was probably triple to quadruple this size when I finally hacked it down. It ate the Beefsteak Tomato plant next to it in the garden and consumed my poor gnome, Gerald. In the end, it took about three hours to hack it down and pull up all the roots.
RIP crazy tomato plant - hopefully your replacements will be as formidable as you were - I can't wait until the first yellow flowers start appearing...
No comments:
Post a Comment