Give your tomatoes a good time! Tickle, pinch and poke them!

It’s still tomato time, so here’s even more tips for getting great tomatoes. I might have to collate them all into their own page before the end of the season!Some of tips get repeated throughout the posts but they're important enough to keep reminding folks about. The last post in this series is here.

Hand pollinate your tomato flowers with an old toothbrush. Tickle the insides with a brush then doing the same to other flowers on the same plant transfers the pollen from one to another. You’re just like a Bee!

This technique is particularly important if you are growing your tomatoes in a greenhouse or a netted area. Both of these locations can greatly reduce access by pollinators, so you will have to do the job.

I use a different brush for each variety of tomato I have for the year. Every so often, throughout the season, I’ll give them a good wash with soap and water, then alcohol to stop spreading any possible contaminants that may have been inadvertently picked up. I do the same at the end of the season too, so that the brushes are ready for next year.

On appropriate varieties, continue to pinch out the side stems (or ‘suckers’ if you're an American) to give the rest of the plant more vigour. The side stems are the ones that come out from where the leaf meets the stem. You only need to do this on indeterminate tomato varieties. Some varieties don't need this, so check on a reputable Tomato specialist website or catalogue to see if you need to do it.

In many varieties of plants, the side stem will only produce leaves and not flowers and fruit. Removing them pumps more energy into the leaves and flowers on other parts of the plant.

Poke those side shoots into damp potting mix so that they can take root and give you new plants!

Tomatoes are remarkably easy to clone. Practically any part of a stem has the potential to produce roots. We can use that characteristic to our advantage and turn side shoots into new plants for MORE TOMATOES!

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