New Plants from suckers

[chrysanthemum]

My next door neighbors grow mostly tomatoes and peppers in their garden, and they do very well with it.  I’m always impressed.  This year, though, their tomato plants are not doing well.  It started with curling leaves on one transplant, but it has been spreading to other plants.  They took a picture to the nursery where they bought them, and they said it was lack of water.  I’m skeptical about that because our six inches of rain should have solved that problem, but it hasn’t.  

Today I was pruning lower foliage and some pretty big suckers off a number of my plants.  They’ve grown well this spring, but I wanted to get the leaves away from the soil, and I wanted to keep them a bit less jungly on my trellis.  It dawned on me that I could save the suckers and root them in water as backup plants for my neighbors.

I’ve done this for myself before.  Last year I had only one Black Krim seed left in an old packet, but I ended up with six plants over the course of the summer because of rooting suckers.  This is a helpful trick in climates that allow for fall planting, but it can also work from a plant started very early inside for a spring planting.


Right now I have the suckers in jars of water to help get roots started.  I wanted the plants to stay outside, but our forecast is calling for storms with high winds and possibly hail tonight, so I stuck the jars in an empty pot for stability, and they’re hiding under a table on our deck..

[macmex]

Yes indeed! We used to do this when I was growing up in NJ. We'd cut off a sucker and then, using a broomstick, we'd make a deep hole in the soil, where we wanted the new plant to grow. We'd stick that sucker down in the hole as deeply as we could get it, with at least the top leaves still sticking out, and water it as we pushed the soil in around it. The invariably rooted. In NJ, there was just enough time to make a crop, especially if the tomato was a cherry variety.

[heavyhitterokra]

Being an Electrician, I always have Romex scraps laying around. I've taken suckers and grafted them onto other tomato plants, using the outside jacket of a piece of Romex as a splint to hold the graft in place until it healed, though, I've never thought of trying to root a sucker to start a whole new plant. You guys have given me a new idea for another project to try someday.
Thanks for that post.

[chrysanthemum]

My neighbors and I planted all of my tomato suckers this morning. It was overcast this morning, and we have chances of getting some rain the next few days. It started sprinkling just as we finished, but we didn’t have much accumulation. Their other plants are actually showing some improvement, but they had all sorts of unplanted beds in their garden, so we filled a long, long row and a rectangular plot with tomato suckers. I had grown out some more sweet potato slips, so we put those in another unused bed. The tomato suckers had not developed roots, but we were able to plant them deeply. (They have raised beds, too, but they added a second layer over what already existed when they bought their house.). I warned them to keep them well watered if it doesn’t rain. It will be interesting to see how things go.