RE: [gardeners] tomato, chile cuttings
Lillian Kepp (gardeners@globalgarden.com)
Thu, 18 Sep 97 19:49:41 PDT
On Thu, 18 Sep 1997 11:40:04 -0700 Margaret Lauterbach wrote:
>Has anyone on this list taken cuttings of a tomato plant, rooted
them and
>brought them inside for the winter? Seems to me it would be faster
than
>planting a seed. Do you take the cutting back to the "trunk"?
Trim off
>any "heel"? How about taking chile stem cuttings? Some of my
chiles are
>larger than I want to bring inside. I'm digging up and bringing in
about
>4, but I have some Ajis that are about 4 feet tall and just now
budding. I
>think they're already two years old. Sigh. Margaret
Last fall, I took the advice I saw on chile-heads. Take cuttings
from the chile plants from "new growth". Make sure you have four
leaves and cut from the plant on an angle. I stuck the end in
rooting hormone (compound?) and planted in six pack holders. A
lot of them took hold. I would have had a nice bunch of plants
except I forgot about them over Christmas they didn't get watered.
It did make some nice compost. :)
As you probably know what's nice about the cuttings is that if
you have a nice plant with hard to find seeds, and feel that
maybe the chiles have cross-pollinated, the cutting makes a clone
of the plant. If you can get it to grow indoors over winter, then
you can make more cuttings from it in the spring and have more
plants to put out.
Lillian