Hypothetically speaking, let’s just say you were doing some work in your greenhouse and you accidentally whacked the entire top off of one of your beloved tomato plants. We’re not saying this happened or anything, just hypothetically speaking.
We’ve mentioned before that plants don’t have mechanisms that allow them to repair damage, so what’s done is done. However, tomatoes, and many other internodal type of plants like them, can actually recover from a situation like this.
You’ve likely heard of suckers on indeterminate tomato plants. And how in most cases, to get a vertical growing tomato plant, you want to remove these suckers. Well, this would 100% be a case where you would want to keep the next closest sucker growing!
Suckers will eventually turn into another “main vine” for the tomato plant. If one allows this sucker to continue it’s growth, the tomato plant will be able to pick up right where it “lopped off.” This sucker will effectively work just like that main vine did, producing flowers and leafed internodes, just like the main vine did.
Pruning tomato plants is an essential aspect to controlling healthy and controlled growth. But, this unique situation brought up a use case where maintaining a sucker might be a desirable outcome on an indeterminate tomato. We’ll have more to say about tomato pruning in the near future, of course, but this was a “theoretical” example where we could demonstrate a different desired path.
Were you to have all ready trimmed your suckers and this were to happen, it’s still not game over. Tomatoes have remarkable ways of continuing their growth in the face of clumsy growers. If left no other options, the tomato plant will figure out how to spawn “second suckers” or sometimes even push up a new main stem out of the roots. If this is your case, just leave the plant be and see what it does.
Sure, any kind of damage like this is going to set you back a bit. But, in our climate, the idea of “starting over” from seed doesn’t exist. You might even find it challenging to locate a replacement this late in the season. But, there’s no need and the plant will use all its resources to continue its growth.
Other than this event, we’ve been really happy with our tomato plants thus far this season. We’ve made some major changes to our techniques to try and solve some ongoing issues we’ve faced for years and it’s really panning out. We’re figuring out how to structure a multi-part series to discuss those changes!
