Bumper harvests in small spaces
With space for many gardeners at a premium, it’s wise to seek maximum cropping from each plant. Training indeterminate varieties as a double, rather than single, cordon, can give twice as many fruits from one plant. Grown on their own roots, the individual fruits of a double cordon will often be smaller in size, but this is where grafted plants come into their own.
Available to buy now, grafted tomatoes are propagated onto an incredibly vigorous root system, and this vigour then transfers into the plant and subsequent yields. Grafted plants are ideal for double, triple and quadruple cordons.
We also experimented with a tomato ‘fan’, where eight stems were trained equally against a sunny wall, all arising from one (non-grafted) cordon plant of ‘Sweet Aperitif’. You can either remove sideshoots or, if there’s room, tie them
in. It’s an ideal method for cherry toms (fruit size reduces by around 35 per cent meaning it’s not so suited to slicing and beefsteak varieties). The results are attractive, and cropping potential is phenomenal! Ripening is delayed by roughly 4 weeks due to lots of pinching out and tying in to create the fan shape, but once fruits start colouring up, expect harvests to ramp up hugely – we were picking over 140 fruits every three to four days at the height of summer. From our trial assessments, cherry toms ‘Sweet Aperitif’, ‘Red Cherry’, ‘Strillo’, ‘Black Cherry’ and ‘Consuelo’ all had enough vigour and sideshooting ability to make beautiful fans. Grafted plants would, no doubt, boost yields even further.
Gardeners with no space for cordons can still gain good yields by growing dwarf, ‘patio’ varieties; many only reach 50cm in height and width. We grew ‘Maskotka’, ‘Losetto’ and ‘Romello’ – one plant per 25cm diameter pot (large hanging baskets also work). Though plants faded by late summer, the best performer was ‘Losetto’ – one plant gave 254 fruits (1.4kg).