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Winter Tomatoes – Coming Inside

October 10, 2012

Can one actually grow tomatoes inside throughout the winter?  Well, I guess we’ll find out soon enough, ha?

So far, the process has been fairly painless…the cuttings rooted well, transplanted fine and even recovered enough in the last month to put out some new growth and several little flowers!

So, with the cooler evenings (and treats of frost) we brought in our three pots of cherry tomatoes a couple of days ago (to clarify, two of the cherry tomatoes are cuttings, while the third was planted in a pot as a transplant at the beginning of the summer and I’m just trying to prolong its life 😉 )

While my original intention was to spread them around the house they are now positioned on the bottom shelf of our grow light stand in our laundry room.  Once they actually came inside, it became apparent that they would take up much more room than I originally envisioned, so I trimmed some of the suckers and onto the stand they went!

The three black pots in the photo below are our tomatoes.  I strategically placed them so the will grow behind the lights and against the wall so 1) they’ll take up less space and 2) so I can utilize the wall and back braces of the stand to better support their vines as they continue to grow (fingers crossed).  Right now the vines are only being supported by a few bamboo sticks and binder clips to rest their little stems on.

From left to right we have: bi-color cherry, yellow pear cherry and sweet red cherry.
The terra cotta pot holds one of our sad house plants I’m trying to revive and the
recycled yogurt containers hold strawberries I’m attempting to propagate in the
hopes we can transplant them into the pallet beds next spring. 

With all the new growth and flowering happening, I am quite hopeful they will continue to produce.  There really is nothing quite like a tomato grown in the sun and fresh off the vine, so their quality is yet to be determined.  However, I may think differently if I can add a few of these babies to my salad in the dead of winter.  Time will tell…

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8 Comments on “Winter Tomatoes – Coming Inside”

    1. I think I’ll have to…the problem might be in me actually remembering to do it, though…

  3. I’ll be following this experiment with interest! A fresh tomato in winter would be welcome indeed!

  4. We tried this one year. They survived and we got a couple of tomatoes but they got so long and spindly that they took over everything- maybe I needed to more aggressively pinch them back to be bushy. And then they got infested by whitefly and the whole mess went outside in January. End of experiment. I’ll be eager to see what you manage.

    Judy

    1. Ugh…I do hope it winds up better than your experience! Geez, doesn’t sound fun at all! I will keep my fingers crossed for different results 🙂

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