When Myrna and Earl Fincher married 53 years ago they started farming their yard “out of necessity”. Today, the Finchers make a living selling their organic produce to restaurants and at the local farmers’ market twice a week for much of the year. They had no experience as farmers, but learned by trial and error.

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The original comes from Loch Ness Water Gardens at this link.

If you enjoy growing tomatoes year-round, both indoors and out (as weather permits), then you’ll be interested in this method of doing so.  Rather than saving and re-planting seeds to do it, you can try plucking and sprouting suckers.

Most tomato enthusiasts are familiar with suckers.  They are the “Poseidon’s branch” that sprouts from the center of the fork between the plant’s trunk or a main branch and a fruit-bearing side branch.  If you imagine this joint being the “L” between your thumb and forefinger when you do the “loser” sign on your forehead, a sucker is a branch emitting from the web of your thumb.  It’s often thought that if these suckers are removed early, the size and number of tomatoes the plant grows will increase.

If left to their own devices, however, these suckers will become full branches with side shoots and leaves of their own right.  To propagate your tomato plant, you can allow one or two of these suckers to grow until they are 3-5 inches in length (much more and they may begin sprouting fruit, at which point they may be too weak to sprout on their own).

At that length, carefully cut or pluck the sucker at its base – at the fork on the mother plant – and immediately put it in room temperature water for about 8 hours.  Take care not to tear the skin of the plant or the removed sucker as this can cause dehydration and kill or slow growth.  Then put it into moist potting soil (in any starting container) and keep the soil moist for several days.  New roots will likely appear within a week as tiny fingers coming from the cut base of the sucker.  Until you’ve done this a few times and learned what works best for you, expect a 50% attrition rate, but don’t be discouraged by it.  You can take 2-3 suckers off of one tomato plant, so you aren’t going to lower the number of plants you have growing at any time.

If kept in their own containers with relatively deep, good potting soil, these suckers will take root quickly and you’ll begin to see them growing within a week or so.  By two weeks, they will be noticeably larger.  Once they are of suitable transplant size, unless you’re container growing and you sprouted them in your container to start with, you can move them like you would any other seedling.

Expect the plants to be quite vigorous and to produce buds and tomatoes quickly.  Once you’ve mastered sprouting suckers, you can expect to lose maybe 1 in 10, so you’ll eventually get to the point where you have to cull your plants.

If you’re growing tomatoes year round in this manner, it’s a good idea to just cull older plants that are down to low production after peaking – harvesting the green tomatoes for pickling or bag-ripening – in favor of the newer plants.  This should help you maximize harvests and you will likely be able to grow 3 or more harvest rotations in one season, even in northern climes.

Excerpted from “Garden Planning 101″, coming soon to the Member’s Area.

One of the things that you must do when building a garden plan is to account for rotation.  It’s for this reason that garden plans are not made for one year, but are instead made for 3 or 5 years (most gardeners prefer an odd number so that the mixing remains off-year).  Gardening in the ground or in raised beds is a fixed-location prospect, meaning you can’t move the soil as easily as you can the plants.  So you must plan for that soil to be used for successive years while keeping it such that it will keep your plants healthy over that time.

This is usually called soil husbandry and we’ve talked about the basics of soil nutrition in earlier chapters.  With crop rotation, we’re completing that circuit of soil husbandry by keeping the soil as free of pests and disease as we can, using the simplest method possible.

Disease Mitigation

Over time, if a certain type of plant is grown in the same soil, the microbes and other organisms in the living soil will get used to that plant and some that are targeted towards that type of plant will begin to prosper.  Most of the time, organisms that are specialized in a specific type of plant are detrimental to it.  So soil that grew lettuce really well for 2-3 years will suddenly start producing diseased, damaged, unhealthy lettuce.

For this reason, those interested in soil husbandry and who don’t have access to or don’t wish to use chemicals, will rotate their crops to prevent the soil from getting used to the same types of plants.

Rotation Plans

The easiest type of crop rotation is annual: you move plants around the garden every year.  It’s also least effective, since you are still growing the same plants in the same location biennially.  A better rotation plan is 3 or 5 years instead.

In this plan, the garden is sectioned into parcels and planned out for 3 or 5 years.  Every year, plants are moved to a new section that they haven’t occupied before in a rotation that takes 3 or 5 years for them to return to their original plot.

By using an odd number, gardeners can keep from getting in the habit of having “this growing here on even years, and there on odd years”, which often leads to biennial rather than true rotation.

So in a typical garden plot of 10×10 feet (100 square feet), we could divide it into three sections of 10×3.3 feet each (for simplicity).  Each section would have certain types of plants in it – say lettuce and tomatoes in one, beans and peas in another, and cucumbers and squash in the third.

Each year, the crops move over one space to the next section of soil.  So on year two, our sections would be cucumbers and squash, lettuce and tomatoes, and beans and peas.  The year after that: beans and peas, cucumbers and squash, and lettuce and tomatoes.  Then the following year we’re back on the original lettuce-tomatoes, beans-peas, and cukes-squash.

This means that each section of the garden has two years without a specific type of plant, keeping the diseases from getting a chance to settle in.

Of course, the above example is extremely simplified, but it should illustrate the idea for you.

How exactly you set up your rotation will depend on a number of things, but if you understand the concept, the rest is not too difficult to account for.