Maximize Your Tomato Harvest with Cuttings🍅🌿

When you start tomato seedlings in the spring it almost always feels like you have plenty, but once late frosts kill a few, bugs 🐛 eat a few more, your dog digs a few up and you accidentally step on some you now have a lot fewer than you started with.

We only grow yellow tomatoes now, they produce so much better than the red varieties.

You will probably not notice a difference until the plants start producing and you now don’t have enough tomatoes to make salsa, but now it’s too late to start seedlings, the first day of fall is only a little more than a month away!

In this blog I will show you how you can maximize your tomato harvest once seedling season is over.

Tomato plants propagate very easily, so as long as you have at least a few healthy plants left you should be able to start more plants from cuttings.

Step 1

You want a stem that looks like this, healthy and young

Find a tomato plant that is relatively healthy, select a stem that is about 6”-12” tall (the bigger the better) you want to take your cutting from a branch that has new growth and no fruit, if there are some flowers just snap those off.

Step 2

Place your cuttings in a bucket of water, the water should cover the cuttings except for a few leaves at the top, it’s okay break of any lower leaves off, you want mostly a bare stem except at the top

Step 3

Leave the cuttings in a shady spot until you start to see thick white roots, at first they will sprout thin white hair looking roots, you want the thick ones.

Step 4

Dig a hole deep enough to cover the plant all the way up to its leaves, keep your new plants very well-watered, you may want to provide them shade in the middle of the day to prevent them from losing too much water while they are growing roots.

Step 5

Continue to water your plants thoroughly for several weeks, at that point they should be firmly established, and you can cut back on the watering.

Enjoy your harvest!

Hopefully this blog will help you get more tomatoes 🍅 started before autumn arrives, if you would like more gardening tips we have several in our book https://www.longcreekfarm.net/product-page/homesteading-101-book