We all know that we need to remove tomato suckers as part of routine tomato pruning.
But did you know that you can then grow these suckers to get extra plants for late summer tomatoes?
This is a perfect example of the kind of sucker you want to grow on.
It is quite large and, as such, will turn into a decent-sized plant rapidly.
Prune the sucker as normal, using a pair of sharp secateurs or snips.
Then as soon as you remove the sucker, you want to get it into some water.
You want to leave the cutting in this water then until it starts to root.
This sucker was left in that same bucket of water for roughly two weeks, and as you can see above, it has just started to root.
I will leave it in the water for another week before doing anything with it.
That is because the roots on it at the moment are still small, and they won’t be able to support all of the foliage on this cutting.
By leaving it in the water a little while longer, the roots will grow out and develop more.
You can see that there are plenty of roots but that they are still small at the moment.
Once the roots are a little more developed, I will pot this cutting up into multi-purpose compost.
When it is in compost, you need to keep the compost wet.