GREAT a forum for tomatoes :-D

[william tipton]

Hello everyone.
I'm growing tomatoes indoors and want to ask some questions. Ill link to the pics later in the post.

Firstly, these are all cherrys and indeterminate from my understanding.

I found that if I cut the top of the plant it stops verticle growth which is great because I only want them to get so tall.

-Will doing this have any other adverse affects on the plant?

If you see the photo of the plants on the table, those are all the tops cut from the plants in the large planter. Two of them are in that clay pot and doing remarkably well. They were half that size when first cut.

-If I keep cutting the top of the plant like Ive been doing, is it possible to keep propagating a single plant indefinitely or is there anything in their genes that tells them 'ok, thats enough growing' that will cause them to finally stop?

These are indeterminiate plants from my understanding, so thru the season can I expect more flowering stems to show up on the existing plants or do they just grow once on any particular part of the plant then never again....meaning once all the flowers on the plants have done whatever they are going to do, is that it or if the plant is still alive will new buds continue to grow?

Thanks for ANY help you guys can offer

[img]https://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m47/jesusjunky4321/100_2375.jpg[/img]
[img]https://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m47/jesusjunky4321/100_2376.jpg[/img]
[img]https://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m47/jesusjunky4321/100_2377.jpg[/img]
[img]https://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m47/jesusjunky4321/100_2379.jpg[/img]

[Inamon]

My understanding is that indeterminate plants will grow and grow and grow! By cutting the tops off of your current plants you will limit height, which is what you want but make sure that you do not pinch out any of the suckers (suckers are branches that grow between a bifurcation - split).

The tops if set correctly and doing well will continue to grow and will produce new healthy plants that in turn will be required to be stunted. All the plants will go to flower and hopefully fruit set, you may well be able to do this many times throughout the year. (never tried it myself so I am interested.)

Keep us informed as to what is happening.

[william tipton]

My understanding is that indeterminate plants will grow and grow and grow! By cutting the tops off of your current plants you will limit height, which is what you want but make sure that you do not pinch out any of the suckers (suckers are branches that grow between a bifurcation - split).

The tops if set correctly and doing well will continue to grow and will produce new healthy plants that in turn will be required to be stunted. All the plants will go to flower and hopefully fruit set, you may well be able to do this many times throughout the year. (never tried it myself so I am interested.)

Keep us informed as to what is happening.

Cool ....thanks for the help

I went to the local plant store today and talked to two ladies who gave me two completely opposite stories

One said that the cherries would continue to put out flowers as long as the plant was alive, the other said that once they produce on part of the plant, thats it.....only newer parts of the plant will produce more tomatoes....so I'm still confused about that part because the other lady said just the opposite, that the plant would keep producing as long as it was alive even tho I cut the tops and stopped the upward growth.

The one lady said the same thing you did...that as long as I do it right it is feasible to keep propagating indefinitely....which is really cool, not even from a production standpoint, but simply an interesting aspect of the plant.

Something that did confuse me tho was that the one lady who gave me what seemed to be false information also said that when I cut the top of the plant and start the new one, that I 'may' end up with the same cherry tomatoes or they may mutate into a different kind of tomato plant each generation .....is this even remotely true?

Thanks again for the help. So far this has been a lot of fun even tho we have only gotten one ripe tomato at this point (we're more experimenting than anything else at this point in time)

[Roger]

Something that did confuse me tho was that the one lady who gave me what seemed to be false information also said that when I cut the top of the plant and start the new one, that I 'may' end up with the same cherry tomatoes or they may mutate into a different kind of tomato plant each generation .....is this even remotely true?

She is somewhat right. If you save the seeds from your tomatoes, their specific genetic strain can change each generation depending on what types of tomatoes they were cross pollinated with. It depends on what kind of tomatoe they were to begin with and what other kinds of tomatoe plants are planted near them. Since you are making cuttings, I don't think this would apply to you - pollination doesn't affect the genes of the parent plant itself, but rather the genes within the seeds produced by that plant. Rooting a cutting from a plant is not a new 'generation' of that plant : it is the same generation, genetically speaking. Even with subsequent cuttings and rootings. If you later plant any of the seeds from this first generation plant, or any of it's rooted plants : then that would include the new genes that were introduced by pollination, and fruit from that seed would possibly be different in some genetic manner.

[william tipton]

Thats interesting.

Well, I kept weighing things out and decided since it still early that I was gong to ditch the cherries and take some of my early girls and move them inside.
They were out at the father in laws garden and frankly, not doing well at all.
I clipped off a lot of dead and dying appendages and buried the existing roots down about 12 inches and about 10 inches of the lower main stem is covered in soil too so that there are tomatoes growing about 8 inches above the surface of the soil now in the pot.

I thought that the 3 plants would take a week or so to get over the shock of being moved, but I think taking them out of the ground, doing very little damage to the roots, and getting the roots immediately into a bucket of water must have helped because we just did it yesterday and the look extremely happy just 24 hours after major surgery.

[img]https://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m47/jesusjunky4321/tn_1111.jpg[/img]

it only drooped over for a bout an hour and that was it.
I watered it pretty heavily right after the transplant, but still didnt expect her to perk up as quickly as she did.

I'm not doing cherries indoors anymore. Far too much work involved for such a tiny little tomato