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When to thin
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) |
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