How to Clone Tomato Plants

| Introduction

There are many tedious experiences you will encounter on your allotment or growing journey.

One of the more disheartening is discovering that your favourite variety of tomato, that suits your every desire and culinary requirement, has been dropped by the breeder or maintainer from their breeding program. It is so frustrating.

Many tomato cultivars available to the home gardener, are hand-me-downs as a result of breeding work for commercial production on a very large scale, when the variety no longer has a purposeful use, it is discontinued. Maintaining an F1 hybrid is an expensive task in time and money and must be financially viable.

It happens and it's so annoying, especially if they don't replace it with a superseded cultivar.

The selection is now extinct, abolished, vanquished to the seed graveyard in the sky and gone forever. But is it?

If you have the absolute tomato you are struggling to live without, GrowMad's David Hinckley has a rescue remedy to save the day.

There's a lot to cover, so let's get to the root of it.

Read more...

| Losing Your Favourite Variety

At GrowMad, we trial a lot of varieties of many different veg types and have spent years finding the perfect varieties for us to share with you.

One of our favourite tomato varieties was 'Ferline F1' a first-class variety in all ways - good colour, shape, yield, texture, taste and above all, virtually blight-resistant when used for outdoor production. It was withdrawn by its French breeder in 2019 and the seed ultimately disappeared from sale in 2020.

Luckily we were able to secure enough seed to provide us with plant material for the next 2-3 seasons but to continue with this variety into the future, we would have to work with other methods of propagation.

If a variety is of open-pollinated origin, simply keep your own seed from year to year, but if an F1 Hybrid (which Ferline is) keeping your own seed is not a viable option. Any resulting seed you take will merely revert to one of the many bloodlines used in the original crossing and never come true.

The choices are few. Without seed, you have to clone from a mother plant to ensure the purity of a particular variety.

Cloning a variety is carried out in two ways, tissue culture or by taking cuttings. For the home gardener, tissue culture is not an option, but taking cuttings certainly is, and what's more, it's an easy task.

| What is a Clone

Cloning is a term to mean creating an identical to the original, in this case, an identical tomato plant. Basically you will be taking cuttings from a tomato mother plant to create new planting stock rather than raising from seed.

Traditionally, cuttings of most plants would be taken from a growing point/tip, but with tomatoes, you can take your cuttings from side shoots. If you are using indeterminate fruiting plants during the normal growing season, you would be removing these anyway, so win-win, side-shooting and making new planting stock at the same time.

| How to do it

Taking cuttings from tomatoes is an incredibly easy task. Simply remove side shoots from the stem of the plant and place them into water in a well-lit warm situation eg a heated propagator or even the kitchen window sill.

During the spring and summer, the tomato cuttings will produce roots within 4-5 days but will take longer during the darker days of autumn and winter.

After roots have appeared, pot on into peat-free multipurpose compost as you would normally do. Hey presto, an identical tomato plant without the need for a seed.

| Timing

Tomato cuttings can be taken at any time during the year, but as with tomatoes from seed, spring and summer are optimum.

| Growing On

Once your tomato cuttings have established, grow on in the normal way -

• Heated greenhouse or polytunnel from February onwards
• Cold greenhouse or polytunnel from May onwards
• Outdoor Production from late May onwards

These dates are for guidance only, adapt them to your locality and climate.

| Keeping Stock Plants

If you wish to keep a particular variety from year to year, you will have to over-winter stock plants in a frost-free environment. A heated greenhouse or conservatory is ideal. You can even keep them in the kitchen, I have over-wintered on the office window sill, but tomato stock plants can become quite unruly.

Take new cuttings during late summer or early autumn as described above and keep frost free until the spring when the entire process starts again. Treat as a house plant.

Rinse and repeat.

| What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

No seed - if a variety is dropped without warning, try and obtain seed from a seed seller somewhere. Without seed, the project is doomed. Always keep some backup seed if you have a favourite variety, it will keep for several years.

Variety degradation - in time, the characteristics of a particular variety may wane, it can happen, but the better the mother material, the better the resulting offspring.

Virus - if a plant contracts a virus, that virus will spread in the plant material used to take cuttings and be passed on. Keep your stock pest and disease free.

Take care of your stock - it may seem an obvious one, but don't forget to water and feed your stock plants, when they're gone they're gone.

| Takeaway & Conclusion

If you have fallen victim to a favourite variety disappearing never to be seen again, with a little imagination, you can see it is possible for it to live on. You may even end up being the only person in the world holding a particular variety.

The key for a variety to live on is to always have some seed of your favourite variety left in your seed box just in case of emergency.

What are you waiting for, get out there and GrowMad!

See you on the soil...

David.