Once upon a time on usenet George Shirley wrote:
On 2/2/2015 2:19 AM, ~misfit~ wrote:
Once upon a time on usenet Terry Coombs wrote:
Well , I've got lots of tomato seedlings now ... and two in most
cells . When do y'all thin your seedlings ? I can do it now , but
then if one dies ... or I can do it when they're bigger , and the
dominant one is more apparent . That approach however uses more of
the finite amount of nutrients available , and maybe thinning now
will make one that wouldn't have been dominant actually be stronger
than ... Decisions decisions !

Here's another decision that I haven't got around to experimenting
with yet.....

What if you're actually pulling out the plants that're slower to grow
vegatively but are better at fruiting when you remove the smaller
ones?
It's pretty much impossible to know which plants will fruit the most
unless you have ESP with plants. Maybe a Zen experience with
tomatoes? G
Gardening, at best, is a hit and miss experience in my opinion. You
can do everything right and the damned plants won't grow properly or
the weather changes to bad, or bugs and birds eat everything you
plant, or the dog digs them up. Basically gardening is a crap shoot
but if you do the best you can most times you are rewarded. Wife and
I gardened with our parents at a very early age and here we are in
our mid-seventies still trysting with the garden gods. Just go for it.

I'm a couple of decades younger than you but have a similar experience.
Actually my parents started cutting back on food gardens when I was young
(both employed so less time coupled with the rise of the supermarkets.) and
so I took over. I've always believed that a person should be part of nature,
not seperated from it by plastic bags and cling film.

My thinking about which tomato plants might yield better not necessarily
being the fastest starters comes from my recent involvement in grafting
dwarf fruit trees. I've been keeping my own tomato seeds for years and, for
the most part it's been a success. However there are always plants that do
so much better than others. Being an invalid and seeing a year-on-year
reduction in mobility recently I've been thinking about how best to grow
less tomato plants but better ones.

As it is for the past few years I've started plants inside very early, put
out maybe six and taken cuttings from them. Then, as they start setting
fruit discarding the cuttings from the worst fruiting plants and only using
cuttings from the best. (They fruit so much faster from cuttings than they
do from seed so it's not like you need to live in the tropics to do this.)
However recently I've started wondering about my selection process for the
starting six, as per my previous post.

I've been playing with LEDs and a couple of planted aquariums over last
winter (I'm in the southern hemisphere) and am thinking of trying to keep
cuttings of the best couple of tomato plants going through the winter, just
enough light and nutrient to keep them alive at first then boost both to
start extra cuttings pre-spring. Select plants for disease resistance and
fruit production this summer and clone them as we've been doing with fruit
trees for hundreds of years.

Alas, as you say above it's a crap shoot at times and this spring / summer
in NZ has been crazy so it's hard to judge which plants will be worth
keeping through winter. Normally at this time of the year I'd be giving
excess tomatoes to neighbours already but this year I've only had one tomato
sandwich and the rest of the fruit is still very green.

This summer I've had success bud grafting peaches, nectarines and several
citrus varieties, mostly on dwarfed trees in pots as I rent and even though
I've been in this house for over a decade I don't see the point in
developing a home orchard in-ground. It's got me thinking... I wish there
was a plant that would serve as a perrenial rootstock for tomatoes, one that
I could graft new scion 'wood' to each spring so I don't loose weeks of
potential fruiting time on growing roots. I love tomatoes but refuse to
buy the fake ones sold in supermarkets.
--
Shaun.

"Humans will have advanced a long, long, way when religious belief has a
cozy little classification in the DSM."
David Melville (in r.a.s.f1)