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The late garden flooding in July gave rise to more desperate measures to grow some garden tomatoes during the 2015 season. By early July all the tomatoes plants were long gone from the Big Ugly Greenhouse, planted in soil enriched with chicken manure. There were lots of blooms on the plants and small tomatoes had started to grow. Controlling the multitude of suckers growing on the plants become a bit of a challenge.

This gardener cut off some really great looking suckers and decided to stick them in a jar of water to see what might become of them. The experiment consisted of 6 plants sitting on the porch for 3-4 weeks to see what might happen.

Then in mid July when the flooding took out all but a few chocolate cherry tomato plants, there were just 6 plants left standing. And they were still sitting in water on the front porch. Now they were the only hope to grow some larger sized garden tomatoes this summer.

The six plants were put in a raised bed – next to the mushrooms that had started to grow in the heavy rainfalls. Nurtured quite a bit in their early days, the plants continued to grow and had no problem with blight since our August weather turned dry. The tomato plants actually needed to be watered by late August.

Harvested in early October, this tomato came in weighing 1.5 pounds – grown from a sucker! The remaining tomatoes (many of them picked on the green side before the first frost) totaled some 25 pounds. This gardener became convinced that setting aside a portion of the garden for growing late tomatoes from suckers was an excellent strategy:
• to extend the gardening season,
• for the best of late season gardening treats
• and to chase away those “them floods done killed my garden” blues
–Marcelle St Germain