Another PAR Experiment - Bwa ha ha ha!

Our inspiration

We grow lots of tomatoes at PAR Davies, because the Food Bank recipients love, love, love them.  Since we are a production garden, we're always looking for ways to increase our output.  Our fearless leader had this book in her stash and we decided to devote some space to try this method.  It's supposed to result in tomato plants over 20 feet tall!!

Our fearless leader

First we dug a hole roughly 2 feet in diameter and about 15 inches deep.  We filled this hole with 1/3 organic compost and 2/3 bagged garden soil.  We amended this with a little cotton seed meal and we also added an anti-fungal agent:

Here's what the tomatoes looked like when we started:

There are two tomato plants in this bucket

You remove all of the stems from the tomato, except for the top two.  Then you plant it at the same depth as the plant, not burying part of the stem as in conventional planting.

Our experimental tomato

According to the theory, every place that we removed a stem will produce a sucker that we will train over to the side of the cage that we will put around the plant.  Each of these suckers will grow up the side of the cage and produce fruit just like a standalone plant.  The book's author claimed to have grown one plant over 30 feet tall.  I don't think we expect such a monster (how would we even harvest the fruit?)

This is pretty exciting stuff, yes?  Has anyone else ever used this method for mega production of tomatoes?  We'd love to hear your results.