Friday, May 16, 2008

Plant your Tomatoes upside down

I was fulfilling my assignment today, dutifully visiting the sisters on my beat. We visited with Gloria Murdock for the usual hour then left in a hurry to catch the next sister. Dr. Murdock was in the front yard as we left the house and he had a funny looking contraption hanging on a wire rack and it had a tomato vine hanging out of the bottom. "What in the world?", I ventured. Then he began to tell me that this was the latest strategy--to plant your tomatoes in a bucket with a hole in the bottom and make it so the little varmit can grow upside down. "Why?" Well, he said it works and would I like a bucket? "Sure, I'll see if I can get Merrill to plant one." I brought it home, Merrill laughed, but he went right down to Kerksiek's and bought a couple of tomato starts and tonight we have an upside down tomato hanging from the carport. I'll let you know how it progresses.

2 comments:

Alison said...

Sounds interesting. I heard someone mention upside down tomatoes when I was at the nursery on Friday. It's too late for us, though. Jeff just planted a whole row of tomatoes--right side up.

Christi said...

We planted ours right side up as well. I have seen several products in gardening magazines that do the same thing. One is the "topsy turvy" tomato planter. My neighbor has a big plastic thing with four tomato plants haning down and she has herbs growing on the top. I mostly wanted to try the upsidedown way for my pepper plants. The deer ate them last year. I opted for a container on my porch though. We are already harvesting peas and strawberries. Yum!