Gardening all year is possible even in in Alaska. I just garden indoors when it is too cold outside. And I keep eating fresh tomatoes all winter. I do use a small electric space heater to extend my greenhouse growing season, but it is simply not practical to try and heat a greenhouse all winter. I just move my garden into my warm house. This is a typical harvest last winter from my livingroom garden using the same shelves and grow lights that I also use for starting vegetable seeds. I grow Micro Tom, Red Robin, and Tiny Tim dwarf cherry and grape size tomatoes in gallon pots. My original plants, that I started last year, are still going strong…
…so I pruned back last year’s plants and added some fertilizer and they are looking very healthy a year after they were originally planted. They are blooming again and setting new fruit.
After pruning I had a bunch of green cuttings left over so I decided to see if I could propagate my cuttings into new plants by rooting. Tomato plants are very easy to clone by taking cuttings and rooting in water or seedling mix.
I decided to use these foam rooting plugs to hold my cuttings. They fit nicely onto a small six pack seedling pot. I placed these in a water filled plant tray. I kept the tray filled and didn’t let the foam plugs dry out.
They worked very well and within a week new roots were visible…
…after a few weeks the clones were ready to be transplanted into pots.
The newly potted tomato clones were placed into a plant tray. I use a sphagnum Peat based growing mix that wicks water like a sponge and bottom water my plants by adding water to the trays and not into each pot…
… the flats were added to my grow racks along with last years plants. My livingroom tomato garden is looking healthy with lots of new cloned seedlings that will produce fresh homegrown tomatoes all winter long.