My Tomato Teachers
Just this past week, I had my first heirloom tomato of the season. It’s June—and that’s late. Normally, I’m having my first homegrown, fresh-from-the-garden tomato sometime around March.
But not this year.
For the past few years, I have saved a handful of tomatoes to plant the following spring. These heirlooms are the best I’ve ever grown—not too big, not too small, not perfectly round, but perfectly ripe and completely delicious.
Each year in January, I take some of last year’s tomatoes out of the freezer where they have been waiting, and literally just squeeze the seeds, tomato and all, into small starter pots full of the best potting soil money can buy (which is not cheap!). For the past few seasons, within a few weeks, these little seed starter pots were bursting with new life, small germinated seeds already seeking to become grownups.
But this year? Nothing. Not a one. Not a single one.
How could this be? Were these supposed heirlooms actually GMO modified? Seeds that are genetically modified are designed not to reproduce. Frustrated, I tried again with more frozen tomatoes.
Nothing.
Finally, I resorted to that old standby: Dr. Google.
Sure enough, it turns out I had just gotten lucky the previous years. Freezing an entire tomato and expecting the seeds to remain viable is apparently a big gardening no-no. This is what I get for “experimenting” without checking the manual, I guess.
Luckily, I had another trick up my sleeve.
Many years ago—more than a decade, back when I was in my early gardening days—a friend and neighbor taught me something about tomato plants that literally astounded me. And yes, I do consider astounded an apt reaction to gardening wisdom revealed.
He taught me that you can trim a part of a tomato plant, stick it in soil, and grow an entirely new plant. Yes, it needs some tending—not too much direct sun at first, you can’t let it dry out, and you have to pinch off any premature leaves or flowers so the plant can channel its energy into growing roots, not fruit.
I was so excited to try out this new technique that I proceeded to prune all of my tomato plants—I needed to clear out some of their extra foliage anyway—and stuck the trimmings into small pots. A few days later, my neighbor came by to check on my progress. He tried, unsuccessfully, to hide his grin.
Turns out, it actually matters what part you trim. You can’t just cut off any random piece of the plant. You have to trim the actual growing stem, the main shoot. You have to cut off the part that is actively expanding, not just the extra stuff you didn’t really want anyway.
Here I was trying to get rid of extra foliage and use that to grow new life—sort of like having to give away your Halloween candy to the kids who couldn’t trick-or-treat, but only giving them the Almond Joys you didn’t like anyway (true story).
So, I started again. This time, I took the actual growing stems that possessed the capacity to create a new root system. And you know what? It worked. Not right away, and certainly not without a bit of TLC. But after a few weeks, I had somehow cloned ten thriving new tomato seedlings.
It was this memory I called upon this season.
One of my old tomato plants had somehow made it through the winter, and one other had popped up as a volunteer surprise. With no frozen seeds germinating and facing the devastating idea of a tomato-less summer, I went to work with my shears.
Those trimmings are now thriving plants in the garden. Just yesterday, I took fresh trimmings from them to start yet another new crop.
Because you know me, there is always a moral to the story.
I learned that just because an experiment succeeds doesn’t mean you did it right—sometimes you just get lucky. And just because an experiment fails doesn’t mean you are a failure—sometimes you just need better information.
But mostly, I’m reminded that you have to propagate from the part that is actually growing. You can’t build a new future out of the leftover foliage you were trying to discard anyway. You have to risk the main stem. It takes a little extra tending, a lot of TLC, and the patience to let roots grow before you ever look for fruit.
But when you do? There is absolutely nothing like the taste of a freshly grown heirloom tomato, picked straight from the vine.
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