Tomato: Gardeners Delight » Week Five
The good weather has continued to hold, lots of sun, and hardly a cloud in the sky for most of the week. The wind however has been quite strong at times, on one evening I found one of the plants was leaning over on its side. To prevent any further damage being caused by the wind I have loosely tied each plant to a cane to give them a bit more stability.
As you will see in the photos the plants have grown significantly in the last week, I have already got my first buds/flowers appearing on each plant. It is these flowers which after blooming become the tomatoes, the flowers die and drop away and the tomato begins to form in its place.
The tomato plants had become really bushy as well as taller this week. I have had a good prune to remove all the extra leaves and internodes which were either too close to the base of the plant or just not required. By pinching out the internodes you allow the plant to spend more energy producing tomatoes and not waste time growing leaves.
I had mentioned in week three, that I would experiment with one of the tomato plants and leave the internodes to grow at the base of the plant to see whether I would get tomatoes coming in earlier or remove the internode once it was a few inches long and plant it elsewhere. I have decided against this, it occurred to me the plant which has lots of leaves close to the base of the plant will be too close to the damp soil, if these leaves did start to decay or get disease the disease could spread to the healthy pruned plants. To avoid any disasters I have pruned all the plants.