On 24 Apr, 05:46, RogerT wrote:
Article in Telegraph today about a "new" growbag" being sold by ASDA for
growing tomatoes upside down! They rekcon you hag it high up and let the
plants trail towards the floor. Roots will get warm cos of the "green"
growbag, and all the nutrients will travel down to the plants.

Supposedly been successful across the pond!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening...-tomatoes.html

Doen't have the piture that they have in the paper!

As far as I cant work out, it's not April 1st in any calander!

Roger T

hello, Maddie here from across the pond in Tennessee. I had an older
friend in my previous home over across the state in Eastern Tennessee.
Mr Cates had decided to use his wife's iron hanging pot pole that used
to be rather popular many years ago for people who liked to hang
baskets of flowers ou every year. They look rather like large iron
naked umbrella supports. He'd gotten his bride one when they were
fashionable, and she had done what a lot of people did. (these things
were usually cemented into the ground and held up under years of
weather!) he took some discarded heavy duty five gallon plastic
buckets that had those good handles, cleaned them out and used a large
bore drill bit to cut a center hole in the buckets bottom. the hole
was about the size of a four inch starting pot. He said he then
filled each bucket with his best compost, but had put a cut off piece
of similar sized pvc pile in the hole to keep a tunnel. favorite
tomato plants were then picked for leggyness. The longer stems the
better. put the lid on the tubs temporarily, pulled out the pipe and
gently tucked the leggy tomato plant all the way up to it's neck and
leaves. If there were more than three sets of leaves, he pinched off
the bottom two and left the ends. firmed up the compost a bit and
watered the bucket after he took off the lid and hung it up on his
bride's old iron hanging flower yard ornament (there were usually at
least six of these to hang from, some had eight, they all looked like
oversized naked umbrellas) and let nature do it's thing. Mr Cates has
done this for well on 14 years. The tomato's grow all the way to the
ground, he gently uses a rubber and cloth wrapped bungee cord to
gently hook the tomato vines on and hooks the other end to the top of
the bucket and it continues to grow. I've never seen so many tomato's.
And he planted different kinds. Not just cherry tomato's or slicing
ones. the leggy tomato stems rooted all along in the soil, giving
more support and providing more nutrients to the tomatos, and by
gently hanging a soft support bungee on the lip, actually never had to
prune the overgrowth. One bucket his wife said got well over 18
pounds of tomato's off of! Once the season is past, he just cut the
tomato vine and composted it, dumped out the dirt into his compost
pile and turned it in and kept two buckets for his sunroom with the
most green tomato's after spraying them off good to get all little
hitchhikers off. He'd prune some of the stems off, but he said the
green tomato's would ripen until almost Thanksgiving sometimes if she
didn't make fried green tomato's with them! so if you want to try
something that would be recycling, this is an idea. I did it after I
saw his, and my only problem was I didn't have mine in full sunlight.
HIs were. I still have my own buckets I drilled holes into, and I
know there will be reduced tomato plants soon once everyone puts their
gardens in, and they'll get all leggy and those will be perfect for
hanging in a good bucket of compost. Not too rich, though, as too rich
makes lots of leaves and not much fruit!

just my experience and input. I think you might enjoy it. And they're
great space savers. to keep my soil from washing out before the roots
got established, I put coffee filters over the hole with a slit cut in
it to thread the tomato plant through. And I didn't use a pipe to
make a tunnel, I just threaded my plant into the hole, and filled it
up from there. easy peasy!

maddie over across the pond in west faerie holler in Tennessee near
the Mississippi River