Everybody loves tomatoes. Eating them freshly picked and still warm from light of the sun is a pleasure only tomato growers get to experience. The tomato plant is very easy to grow from seeds or cuttings. They grow and flourish everywhere as long as there’s enough sunlight and water as you can see below.
Tomatoes can be grown from seeds or cuttings. Seed packets can be bought from your local gardening center. If you are feeling adventurous you can try growing them from kitchen scraps. Put tomato seeds on a layer of newspaper and dry them under the sun. They need to be thoroughly dried otherwise it might take a while to germinate them. For the lazy (like me) you can just put fresh seeds on potting soil, put it under the sun to dry, wait a few days, then add water. That’s how I germinated tomato seeds recently.
Wait for them to grow big enough to be transferred to your plot. I usually repot the seedlings into individual nursery pots and wait until they are around 10-15cm long before I transfer them to my garden.
If a friend or neighbour has a tomato plant you want to experience the pleasure of growing, try asking them for cuttings. Just choose healthy shoots and cut them to 10-15cm. Then put your cuttings in a container filled with clean water. Keep the container in a place with indirect sunlight and wait for a couple of weeks for them to take roots. Be sure to refill or replace the water as needed.
When the roots are long enough, 5cm will do, transfer them to a nursery pot filled with soil. Keep them in indirect sunlight for a couple of days. And slowly introduce them to more light. In a few days you’ll have a healthy potted tomato plant ready to be transferred to your garden.
Once transplanted all that’s needed is regular waterings and plenty of sunlight. You might want to add a tomato cage too because these grow until they can no longer keep themselves up.
Described below is my recent experience in growing tomatoes. I had a blast growing the Costoluto Genovese Pomodoro.
Pictured above are tomato plants grown from clones given to us by a friend. It has grown so much since it’s been transplanted.
Above I added strings to support the plants. Using strings proved to be a mistake. Because they just kept growing.
Until the string broke and the plants collapsed under their own weight. They are already bearing flowers and fruits at this point.
We just propped them up with a better support structure and they went about their business of growing and bearing fruits again. Soon enough we are harvesting tomatoes.
At first I thought I might be doing something wrong because my tomatoes have a weird shape. My friend who gave me the seedlings never told me what variety they are aside from telling me they are “pomodoro.” It took me a bit of Googling to find out that they are Costoluto Genovese Pomodoro. “Pomordoro”, by the way, is Italian for tomato. So I guess it’s wrong to say “pomodoro tomatoes.”
I eventually had to take down the plants because they’ve grown too big and they started to attract pests. I made sure to save and root cuttings before I did so. Below is a video of me planting the cuttings I took from my previous tomato plant.
Thanks for reading. Good luck and happy growing!
