Something ate the tops of my tomato seedlings. Now what?
It’s early in the growing season and so you check in on your garden.
Wait! Something came in overnight for a snack in your tomato bed. The tops or side portions of your tomato plants are completely gone. 😩
This exact scenario happened to me the other day. I was giving my plants their daily check, only to notice that the SunGold tomato seedling was reduced to a single leaf.
All that remains is a single leaf near the base of the plant and one offshoot.
Just for reference, here is a similar cherry tomato plant that was about the same size and it’s growth at this time.
Yup, that’s an owl back there that was supposed to be guarding this bed. Is he fired?
This is probably the most important tomato I grow. Our family loves SunGolds; they are our favorite snack in the garden and our favorite fresh tomato pasta ingredient. (Recipe coming soon!)
And it took me searching three nurseries to find this year. I had run out of seeds and so was relying on the nursery to grow them for me. (note to self: try not to leave this to chance next year) But it’s a weird/bad year.
Should you remove the tomato plant entirely and just start with a new one?
Is it possible that the plant is salvageable?
Will it still set flowers and produce tomatoes like your undisturbed plants?
Anyways. Do I go out *again* to see if the nursery still has this in stock?
Or does my headless seedling have a chance?
Barring your plant is not a total loss, meaning you have at least one leaf remaining on your seedling, you can proceed with the rest of the article.
Obviously, if the tops and sides are gone, and all you have is a green twig sticking out of the ground, I’m afraid you’re going to have to start over and get a new seedling/attempt to reseed.
I’ll go through a thought process to help decide if topless tomato plants are keepers or goners.
First, is your plant determinate or indeterminate?
These two types of tomatoes (and plants) grow in entirely different ways and knowing which type will help us figure out the rest.
If you have a indeterminate tomato plant:
Common examples of indeterminate tomatoes include:
Cherry type: Sungold, Matt’s Wild Cherry, Sweet 100
Grape type: Red Grape, Juliet
Beefsteak: Big Boy, Early Girl, Big Beef
Heirloom/Specialty: Brandywine, Black Krim, Cherokee Purple, Green Zebra
Indeterminate tomatoes grow to an undetermined size. This means that they just keep growing and at the same time produce leaves, shoots, and fruit. This will continue until environmental factors kill the plant (frost, no water, etc.) You may even experience plants that reach heights of 8-10 feet.
One of the defining features of an indeterminate plant is the growing tips. Also known as apical meristems, these are located at the top tip of the main leader and the offshoots.
The apical meristems of indeterminates are considered leaf buds. These growing tips readily produce vegetative growth (leaves and stems) nonstop.
As the indeterminate tomato plants grow tall and they produce plenty of offshoots (also known as suckers). These grow almost as additional plants that fruit and vine as much as you let them. The offshoots are located at the junction of a leaf and the main stem, typically at a 45 deg angle.
So how does this help in our situation? An indeterminate tomato (such as my sungold), will eventually grow into a normal sized plant if there is at least one offshoot or sucker present. Essentially all of the growing responsibility of this plant will be placed into this one sucker, which will become the new main leader.
It does not matter at what growing stage your indeterminate is in, so long as you have *one* sucker, you’ve got a very high chance that the tomato plant will survive, grow, and produce fruit.
This is why you can prune offshoots to create new plants pretty readily using indeterminants. Essentially what I have is an offshoot with a very well structured root system.
Things to consider if you have a determinate tomato plant:
You have determinate tomatoes with these varieties:
Beefsteak type: Celebrity, Mountain Fresh, Orange Blossom
Plum type: Roma, Plum Dandy, San Marzano
Determinate plants will grow to a predetermined size. They do this by using all their energy to grow at once. Once they flower, they then stop growing and push all their energy into producing fruit. These are the tomatoes that we primarily use for sauces and canning here in the US.
These plants also produce suckers in the same position as indeterminates, off the leader stem at 45 deg angles.
Check out my offshoots
The reason determinate plants don’t get as large is because their growing tips (apical meristems) are flowering buds. This means that once the plant receives hormonal signals from the environment to stop growing, each growing tip terminates into a flower. Once it turns into a flower at the end it can no longer differentiate into anything else.
The key here is that if your determinate tomato plant has not received flowering signals, and you have a remaining sucker on your plant, there is a chance that your plant will continue to grow. The plant will push all its resources into growing the sucker into the main leader, which will then produce offshoots that will potentially flower.
Here is the one caveat, though. If your plant is far enough along to start producing chemical signals to slow down growth and start flowering, there may be a chance that your plant will not reach its full growth potential.
If you have a determinate, has your plant formed flower buds, flowers or set fruit?
It would instead terminate all growth activity, and just start flowering. This could reduce the overall yield because its size would be small and wouldn’t have as many offshoots to produce flowers for fruit.
It’s hard to tell, aside from the obvious sign that you had flowers all over your plant.
So here’s what I would do: if I had a determinate tomato the same age as my Sungold right now, which I just planted a few weeks ago, and it’s got a solid offshoot, I would keep the plant. I would keep a determinate plant up until about half its mature size.
After it reaches more than half its mature size, if something came and ate the entire top leaving a single sucker, I would be hesitant to rely on this plant solely. If I had the garden space to spare, I would leave it.
But if space were at a premium, I might end up moving it to a pot to watch it for fun and go searching for a replacement or even seed up a couple new determinates. I just wouldn’t have any clear indication that this plant will be able to grow and produce at a high enough capacity to take up valuable garden space.
Anyways, I think that should help figure things out a little bit … I have an indeterminate plant, like I said earlier, and it’s now covered in a makeshift house to protect the new offshoot.
Grow Little Shoot, grow!!!
And you know what? That thing is growing like crazy!
So we shall see what happens to this plant, but hopefully I’ll be able to share some beautiful fresh SunGold pasta recipes with you, made with tomatoes from the little SunGold that could.
