Growing Upside Down Tomatoes

We are almost finished eating the last of our fresh garden tomatoes from 2008. Just a few of the Roma variety are left now. They are good but not nearly as sweet as our upside down tomatoes were. Some of you have asked about how we grew them. We did not buy the special bucket/bags that you might have seen on TV. We just went to our local ranch store and bought good heavy duty horse feeding buckets that have a very strong bail. We picked the bucket type with one side that is flat because you can hang them on a wall or against a post with a special hanging clip. But we ended up using a standing pot holder for them the first time around. For the new growing season, we hope to hang four buckets from a 4 x 4 post that has been secured in cement.

To plant the tomatoes, we first took a hole saw and cut out a hole in the bottom of the buckets probably 1 1/2 inches in diameter. Then one of us held the bucket up while the other slipped the roots of a small tomato plant very gently upside down into the bucket going up through the hole. To secure the tomato, we took a coffee filter with a slit cut into the center and put it over the hole inside the bucket, and around the stem of the tomato plant. Then we gently started to add soil to help hold the plant in place. We added good potting soil with special moisture control and fertilizer already added to it. We watered as we layered in the soil to make certain the roots were nice and moist.

Our tomatoes really took off and grew very well, most likely due to the warmth they were able to attain being out of the ground. The buckets are dark burgundy red so they absorb the heat. We had them on a timed drip system for watering and we had to do some adjusting of the water flow as they grew. They set fruit well and the only problem we had was some sort of caterpillar that latched onto the plants and was a bright green, just like the stems. Since we were inspecting the plants daily, we were able to control that problem by simply picking them off. Whatever they were, they were certainly voracious - and the missing leaves were a tip off for us that we had an issue.

When the weather shifted and we had killing frosts, we were able to bring the buckets inside our garage to avoid freezing. We hung them from the dog's kennel. When the days were still warm, we opened up the door and they were bathed in sun. We left the tomatoes on the vines to continue to ripen there. They hung in the garage like that for more than a month. We finally had to pick them as they were getting messy, dropping some leaves. And we were also afraid that the dog would eat them before we could!

The Roma tomatoes were grown in our backyard garden in a raised bed. They got nipped with frost and we had to get them in sooner than we had wanted to. To harvest them, I simply cut the vines into manageable sections and put them in a very large shallow plastic tub. We stored it on top of the dog kennel and periodically checked them, sorting out the ripest ones to be eaten first.

We have never had tomatoes last this long before and are sure looking forward to growing them again. This time around we are hoping to plant bush snow peas in the top of the buckets early in the spring. Their root nodules will feed the tomatoes nitrogen. And because our buckets are not a large as a typical 5 gallon bucket, we will be able to start them in the garage, hanging from the kennel again, while the weather is still to questionable to hang them outside permanently.

Gardening here in the high desert of Oregon certainly requires some thought. And you have to be willing to take a chance sometimes and maybe replant when something is lost to either weather or critters. Mother Nature is in charge of the climate and growing cycles here!