You may remember the seedlings that were blind in an earlier post. One of the plants had actually grown a leaf, but not a growing tip.
In this photo is how I've gone about to make sure this seedling becomes a healthy plant, as the heading suggests, 'New from Old.
I took a knife and cut the leaf off the plant (A), exposing just the cotyledons - the reason was that there was an axillary bud visible and I wanted this bud to grow and become my new tomato plant. That axillary bud has now formed a healthy side shoot or lateral (circled) on what I hope will be a healthy plant and by allowing it to grow. It will replace the missing growing tip with a new one and be something I can grow in my garden and be happy with.
In this photo is how I've gone about to make sure this seedling becomes a healthy plant, as the heading suggests, 'New from Old.
I took a knife and cut the leaf off the plant (A), exposing just the cotyledons - the reason was that there was an axillary bud visible and I wanted this bud to grow and become my new tomato plant. That axillary bud has now formed a healthy side shoot or lateral (circled) on what I hope will be a healthy plant and by allowing it to grow. It will replace the missing growing tip with a new one and be something I can grow in my garden and be happy with.
Continuing on with the weak, almost non existing heads on this variety of tomatoes, it's time to look at the rest of them and decide what to do with them.
In the photo below, the growing tip is very weak and may not produce a strong enough growing tip to take this plant through until maturity of the fruit. There are two side shoots showing (circled) so that makes the task easier as to which one to choose. In this instance, you would never take the one at the bottom if there is one above it, something the top plant didn't have. The lowest sideshoot is what I call the watershoot and is often very week and not always able to grow with the same strength as the one above it.
So what will happen here is, the top sideshoot will be allowed to grow, while the lower one will be removed, then the top of the plant will be removed.
