So I was heading out to prune my tomato plants of all the damage the grasshoppers caused to them. I sat down at my computer to see how it was done and instead found this article - "The Eternal Tomato" - at Backwoods Home Magazine on "suckering."
The author says that between Y-shaped branches of my tomato plants shoot out little green stalks that use up more than their fair share of nutrients. It's good for the tomato plant to snap these off, but because they contain so many nutrients, those shoots also make great starter plants. Just stick them in good soil, and in five days they start putting down roots. In a few weeks (as opposed to the eight weeks it took for my seeds to become plants), they are plants ready to start producing tomatoes themselves.
These are the ones I started yesterday. I'll post on how they progress. It's worth a try.
