Category Archives: Pests

Tomato Harvest and Seed Saving

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I’m having a sad tomato harvest this year but I’ve read on forums that other people are having problems with their tomatoes too this year. I believe it was potato blight that got to my tomatoes this year since it was about the same time the potato tops started dying. I have been throwing away tomatoes for several weeks now, and once again, another bucket:

I did manage to save some of the fruits for seed saving. 9 fruits from Black Plum tomato plants and 2 from Cherry tomato plants:

I finally gave up on the rest of the fruits – the harvest is a mix of green and red tomatoes. At least we’ll be able to pickle the green ones:

I came across a tomato for seed saving with this special pattern:

I think I’ll name it Black Plum 120, as in 120 degrees, or maybe Peace. I just need to grow the missing vertical bar in the bottom of the peace symbol ;-) I’m excited to see what the offspring from this particular fruit will look like.

How to Propagate Strawberries

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If you already have strawberry plants growing in your garden you can make more plants yourself by propagating the old ones. This is preferred over bringing home plants from another garden because you risk bringing home pests with you, like strawberry mites or nematodes.

You can propagate strawberries by dividing old plants or by taking care of the runners sent out by old plants. If you pinch off the flowers of a selected few old plants you’ll encourage more and stronger runners:

With a 10 cm (4 inch) pot buried beneath a runner it will soon send roots into the pot:

Provided with good potting soil the new strawberry plant will be off to a good start and it’ll be easy to replant since the roots will be intact when you remove the pot and replant elsewhere without the pot.

Cut the stem from the mother plant and replant at 40 cm (16 inches) between plants and 75 cm (30 inches) between rows. These new plants will provide you with healthy strawberries for three seasons before the yield drops and the bed should be replanted, preferably with another type of crop to avoid a build-up of diseases.

After each season most of the foliage should be removed to make room for berries next year. In the picture below in the bottom, three plants have been pruned and the original foliage mess is shown to the right:

Light and air can now reach the plants which in return will provide you with plenty of healthy strawberries in the coming season.

Propagating Strawberry Plants

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My strawberry plants produced a good amount of berries this year, although most of them were eaten by slugs before we could get our hands on them. Mulching is good since the layer keeps the weeds down, but if you have slugs in your garden they will hide underneath the mulch and come up at night when you go to bed. The next morning only half the berries will be left.

In this picture you can see the remaining mulch in my strawberry bed:

What’s more interesting is the runners sent out by the strawberry plants. The mother plant sends out long, thin stalks, that develops roots at certain distances from the mother plant. I wouldn’t want these new, small plants to go to waste so I cut off the long stalks from the mother plants and put a few of the small plants in small pots:

I brought them inside the house and placed the pots in a windowsill. I have no idea if this is the right way to propagate strawberries or if it’s the right time of the year to do it – I’m just having fun and experimenting with this :-)

Note that these new small plants have the same genes as the old plants and therefore tolerant or not tolerant to the same diseases as the mother plants, unlike new plants developed from seeds. If you grow plants from seeds you can at least begin to hope that resistance to certain diseases will develop through the generations.

Just for fun I have planted one of my new potatoes in a pot too:

This particular potato tuber came from the potato harvest this year. I placed the pot in the windowsill too, but I have no idea what will come out of it. ;-)

The common vetch seeds have germinated and seedlings are standing proud:

They grow really fast at the moment and look healthy, so why not sow some more seeds? I prepared the old potato bed for green manure plants and I’ll probably go for late common vetch: