Have you ever had a tomato plant produce so well you wished you could make more of the exact same plant? Well, you kind of can.
Nick’s grandmother has these amazing cherry tomato plants from Thailand that self seed in her garden every year and we wanted to try to bring them to our house. We have some seeds that we are saving (a blog post about that will be posted soon!), but we also wanted to try to take a clone of the plant so we could grow it up indoors over the winter and then clone it again in the spring to make lots of little plants that are ready to go outside!
When you take a clone of a plant you are producing an identically genetic plant to the original one. This can be done with many kinds of plants, but tomatoes clone incredibly well and are an easy plant to start with.
First, you need to take a cutting from your original, or mother, plant. I usually take a few small branches from the bottom of the plant since they would usually be trimmed off anyways.
Next, place your cutting in a small glass of water (a shot glass worked great in this case) and set it on your window sill. You can scratch the edges of the bottom of the stem with your clippers before placing it in the water to help encourage root growth.
In three to five days you will start to see little root hairs forming at the ends of your clone. Your tomato is now ready to be planted! I would suggest growing them up a little indoors before planting them outside.
Below is our tomato clone that we will be growing indoors through the winter to hopefully clone again in the spring!
