Pinching Off Tomato Suckers- an Analogy for Life

This morning while working in my (container) garden, a life lesson hit me in the form of a gardening analogy. (I suddenly understand why the scriptures are full of so many gardening analogies.)

I'm growing a berzillion tomato plants (in containers) on my deck. (A post on just container gardening coming soon.) If you have ever grown tomatoes you know you have to pick off the suckers. This is my first ever attempt at any sort of gardening (with the exception of putting a blueberry bush in the ground last year and telling it to fend for itself). The concept of picking off the suckers was foreign to me. I heard about it from several people, and even watched a YouTube video ("Pinching out" your growing tomato plants) on it, before I finally gave in and tried it.

I'll be honest, the idea of breaking off what appeared to be perfectly good piece of the plant did not seem reasonable to me. It didn't matter that everyone kept telling me that by pinching or picking off the "suckers" that the rest of the plant would flourish. Many of the "suckers" already had blooms on them, and appeared to be putting out good fruit. Why would I want to cut those off?

If you have never done it before, here are some pictures.

On a tomato plant you have the main stem, and then branches. A "sucker" is the little branch that grows out between the stem and the branch (making it a tripod, in a way).

It is hard to see the sucker in the picture above until you get more familiar with the concept. If anything, the picture above looks like a healthy, blooming, fruit bearing branch. 

But if you look closer, it is easy to see the sucker. It's that little branch my finger is pointing at, that grows out of the middle.
But if you look closely, you can see it has potential to be a fruit-bearing stalk. It's furry and has the right kind of leaves. It can be really hard to convince yourself to pinch that stalk or stem off.

 Why do you pinch the suckers off? What's the point?
Well, the general idea is that they 'suck' the energy from the more important branches. You want the plant to be sending all of its goodness to the right place. And the more suckers you have, the more the energy gets sucked up. The suckers can put out good fruit. You can leave them there. But the fruit you get won't be as good. It's a choice between quality and quantity. Do you want really good tomatoes? Nice, big round ones? Or just a lot of them? That's the choice you have to make. Quality v. quantity.

 Your suckers can even have suckers. The picture above is a great example of suckers within suckers.

If you aren't familiar with tomato gardening, it can be hard to recognize what a good stem or branch looks like. You want your fruit or blooms to be coming off the branch like in the picture above. When you see a good branch, it is easy to tell. But they are often hiding beneath all of the suckers. Here is the first picture I showed you. Did you even notice the good fruit? Or did you only see the sucker branches?

Here is the life lesson or analogy I picked up along the way today-
Our time, energy, and efforts, are often split and divided in a dozen different directions or branches. Some of the branches are good, some just appear to be good, and some are time sucks that are easy to spot.
But sometimes it can be hard to cut the suckers out of our lives. They can put out fruit, and be hard to cut out. Why would you want to cut something out that produces something good? Even when you know having more time and energy to put into the truly good things would be good for you, and make things grow and flourish, it can be really hard to do.
It can also be hard to identify which things you need to cut out. And you'll find yourself justifying not cutting out some of the suckers, because they do put out good results.

This sucker is so big and strong that it was hard to convince myself to cut it off. It already had blooms on it. But I could see the healthy, good blooms right above it. I knew if I removed the sucker (no matter how big and healthy it appeared), the blooms would benefit from it.

It's all a choice.
I do know this much-
I picked off dozens of suckers a few days ago off of my plants. Just 3 days later my plants have grown tremendously in size, and more of the good blooms have really gotten bigger and healthier.
After I witnessed the improvement in my plants after trimming off the suckers, I got the courage to cut off even more of the suckers - the ones I had left on the plants because they looked so big and healthy, and were putting out fruit already.
I don't feel guilty about it anymore. In fact, I'm excited to see how much more improvement my tomatoes will make. They should all be coming in and ready to harvest in about 2-3 more weeks. (It would have been 3-4 more weeks if I had left the suckers on.)




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Container Gardening by a Rookie

I finally live in a place where I can do some actual gardening. Or, at least it appears to be the kind of place you could do some gardening. But it's all a lie.
I live on top of a mountain, with a large yard and plenty of land.  Each of my neighbors have plenty of land as well. We can't see each other, and we all like it that way.
So what's the problem?
Nature. All that dang nature. It comes with a catch.

My next door neighbor's view

It starts with "on top of a mountain." Our yard is extremely steep. So steep in fact that there is no reasonable way to put a vegetable (or flower) garden in the backyard. And try as I may, there just isn't a good spot in the front yard for a vegetable garden either.

What space I do have in the front yard is a magnet for raccoon and deer. (Not to mention a very passive and friendly bear that lives in the woods between my house and the next house over.)
And so I have resorted to container gardening, greatly aided by ideas garnered on Pinterest.
About 8 weeks ago I bought a starter kit and planted several seeds- tomatoes, jalapenos, snow peas, and sunflowers. I followed the directions, and planted "2-3 seeds per disk." This is something of a joke to me now. It said that because many of the seeds will not take, that it is important to plant 2-3 seeds. I planted 15 disks of each type of plant.

As luck would have it, ALL of the tomatoes took! Not 15 of them! 45! 45 tomato plants! Heaven help me!
Naturally only about 2-4 of the jalapenos actually worked. ALL of the sunflowers (roughly 30) took. And a good 20 of the snow pea plants grew.
That was a problem. I did not have the time nor space nor money to buy that many containers! So I got inventive. (This is where Pinterest (http://pinterest.com/erinannie/gardening/) came in handy.)
Oh wait, I almost forgot to tell you the funny part of this story! Back in early April I hired a teenage boy to come over and do some yard work and clean up for me. He found a topsy turvy I attempted to grow some tomatoes in last year, (It never worked.), some old potting soil, and a bag of seeds. I told him to just toss it all in the topsy turvy, and totally forgot about it. A few weeks later I came back to find a good 20-30 tomato seedlings growing! OOPS!
So there I was with a potential 80 tomato plants, and dozens of other plants needing a bigger home.
I read up on vertical pallet gardening and originally thought that would work perfectly for me. What resulted was just wrong, and pretty funny if you had been there to witness it.
After some diligent dumpster diving for a pallet, I found 2 that I thought might work. (I also just happened to find several really sturdy grocery crates and nabbed them too.)
The instructions seemed simple enough, and the final product was supposed to look like this-

As seen on Pinterest...

Instead, my results looked like this-

DIRT EVERYWHERE!

So I went back to the drawing board and decided to recycle the crates I had found. I originally had a different project in mind for them, but they seemed like a good "container" for my plants.

All I did was put a large black trash bag in the crate, throw in a bunch of potting soil, and transplant the plants into them. I knew the dirt would slide out of the crate if I didn't line it with the bag, hence the trash bag.

This is where I faced my first interesting challenge. The roots of my seedlings had all started to intermingle and intertwine with each other. This was a problem. I was afraid that if I pulled them apart I would kill too much of the root system and kill my plants. (I was okay with a few of them dying, but I didn't want to kill ALL of them!) With little other choice, I kept them in little groupings, and planted them that way.

Meanwhile, in the front yard I did some homemade ghetto "topsy turvy" planting. I got 2 buckets from Home Depot, punched out a hole in the bottoms, and made my own topsy turvy planters. In these buckets I planted actual store-bought seedlings, and not seedlings I grew from seed.

The trees in my yard are ridiculously tall. We're talking redwoods tall. The lowest branches are still way above my head. I tried buying a shepard's crook to hang them from, but they just bent right over and fell. So I spray-painted my buckets green to help them blend in, and hung them on a dead dogwood tree right by my front door.

In one I have strawberries on the top and bottom.

In the other I have green peppers on top, and tomatoes on the bottom.

All of these plants are doing quite well. I've already had 2 strawberries out of the topsy turvy. (Another thing about living on top of a mountain- I've learned I have to wait longer for things to grow. All of our plants seem to be a good 2 weeks behind in growth what I see happening in yards in the valley.) And today I was very excited to see that I FINALLY have buds coming in on both the tomato plant and the green peppers.

Now back to my containers on the back deck. I haven't mentioned that yet, have I? In order to keep my plants safe from the raccoons, deer, etc., I am growing them all on the back deck. Except for the sunflowers- I planted those safely in the ground, way down in the backyard, in a very sunny spot. However, all 10 plants appear to have died. One of these days maybe I will hike down the backyard to inspect them. But they should have grown to at least 2 feet tall by now, and I can't see them, so I assume they didn't make it.

My crate containers have turned out really well! Natural selection has thinned the herd some, but I still have several very strong plants (more than I know what to do with). If it is true that one tomato plant can yield about 10 tomatoes a piece, I'm in for a bumper crop of tomatoes soon! I may only have 6 (7 if you include the bucket in the front yard), containers, but each one holds 2-4 plants each. There are easily 20 very strong tomato plants growing, and a weaker 10 additional plants.

Today I finally spotted several little buds popping up on the tomatoes, which is reassuring. I was starting to worry I was growing some very strong weeds!

The snow peas are a different story. I admit, I had no idea what I was getting into with these! I bought the seeds because they were less than a dollar. That was about the extent of my forethought. Little did I know that these plants can grow to be about the size of tomato plants! Mine are certainly not that big yet, but they are getting quite long and thick. This past weekend I started a new container, separated a few of the plants, and gave them some more room to grow. (The snow peas had the same problem as the tomatoes- the roots were completely intertwined.)

Which brings me to my pepper plants. Oh those fickle little plants! Out of a good 30 seedlings (from seed), I have maybe 3 still growing. They are getting strong and healthy, and are showing a few buds as well.

As you can see,  they are not in crates. I saw this big green bag at a local nursery and bought it. It was about $30. It has worked out very well for me, however, it has not worked any better than the free crates. Also, it took two very large bags of potting soil to fill it up. It is now so heavy I can't lift it. I will continue to use the bag in the future, but I wouldn't recommend buying one. There is a mix of green peppers (store bought seedling), banana peppers, and jalapenos growing in there. To be honest, I'm not even sure if those are my jalapenos that I started from seed. All of the pepper plants look the same to me. (and my markers fell out) I will just have to be surprised when they finally grow in.

Here are my plants 2 weeks ago-

And my plants yesterday!

I'd say my container gardening experiment is working out just fine!

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