Cloning Tomatoes

I spent Sunday morning a week ago attempting to salvage something from my cold damaged tomatoes.  After going through the entire patch of them I felt better that only about twenty percent keeled over.  I made two attempts to mitigate this loss...I cloned the dying portions of the plant and babied the heck out of the living suckers that were below where the stems split on the main plant.  Both efforts proved worthwhile.

One of Robert's co-workers taught us to clone tomatoes last summer.  It was a fun trick we played around with at the end of the year.  This year it has become a tool that saved me at least six weeks of growing time compared to starting new plants from seed.  I simply took the damaged tomato plants and cut the main stem to a length of about six inches.

Stripped all but the top two leaves...

And placed each of them in a 4 inch pot of wet soil.

I then put these pots on trays of water to help make sure the soil didn't dry out and put them in the shade under the tables in my greenhouse.

They looked great for about 2 days, wilted for about 2 days as the shock hit them and then came on strong.  

As soon as they have enough root system to hold the plug together we need to find a place for these pretty seedlings.