In lock down this year I have been able to really get on with my vegetable garden in a meaningful way. It's been super fun, and has taught me a lot. Mostly, what doesn't work in my area due to pigeons and
rabbits, but it is still useful stuff!
Anyway, my big new experiment this year is tomatoes - I've never really grown them in quantity before. Usually a couple of plants in a pot somewhere, that ended up with me due to someone elses surplus seedlings. I've never germinated my own before. The seedling were a success, despite starting fairly late, and I now have about 30 plants out in the garden. I'm hoping they get
enough warm weather to ripen. I have another dozen in the
greenhouse as well.
I was doing my reading about spur pruning, and discovered that you could
root the spurs in a glass of
water for later planting out.
Experiment 1 - will spurs, taken at the end of June (28/06/2020) and rooted in water indoors, have enough time to bear fruit? I think this would be a really useful thing to determine for future years.
Shortly after my spur pruning I was walking around the garden and realised that potatoes are both closely related, and also have some spurs - albeit no where near as many as tomatoes! It set me thinking, could I root them in the same way? And if they root would it give me a way to do a late season planting of potatoes to get an extra crop going into Autumn?
Question 1- has anyone tried rooting potato spurs?
Question 2 - If you have, what were your results like? Did you get a crop?
I wonder if this might be a way to extend both the growing season, and the number of plants from a given set of seed potatoes.
Experiment 2 - I took half a dozen potato spurs, and put them in water in the same conditions as the tomatoes. If they root successfully I will plant them out in a new bed in a few weeks time.