Tomatoes as houseplants

Two Wheels Urban Farm Update

Spring is here and the transplants are going! So far we have peppers, eggplants, tomatillos, onions, leeks, and lettuce. Hopefully our spring will dry out a bit and give me some pre-season time to prepare the beds for transplanting (transplanting is my favorite time of the year!).

Leek sprouts

Indoor Tomatoes

This winter I set up a light and shelving system for growing the urban farm's transplants this spring. I did some testing back in December with tomato plants and afterwards decided I couldn't throw out all of these healthy, beautiful plants, so I kept a single cherry tomato. The variety I kept was a Sunburst, which is indeterminate-- this means that it will continue to flower and grow new stems over time. Hypothetically, unless my plant gets diseased or I forget to water it, it should last indefinitely, just like your everyday house plant. I have my friend Lea to thank for her inspiration. She told me about a tomato plant living indoors in Alaska, and I realized there is no reason I can't make this work!

Interested in growing your own indoor tomato? Here are some steps to help you.

The pot I used is 10 inches across and 5 inches deep. I would think you could go quite a bit larger, but you definitely don't need to use a large pot. 

Transplant your seedling into very light soil or soiless planting mix. I used what I had around at the time, which is a soiless seedling mix. Anything light should work, since the objective is to keep the roots aerated.

I water my plant every day or two when the soil starts to dry (this depends on the size of the plant and how sunny and warm it's been) and I fertilize once a week with a water soluble organic vegetable fertilizer.

South-facing window.

Your plant should live in a south-facing window if at all possible. Even with this set up, because the winter is so dark here (the sun is very low in the horizon and there are a lot of cloudy days) I still need to keep some supplementary lights going during the day. I used two 18" grow bulbs in shop light fixtures (I picked up these lights with the fixtures for about $15 each at the hardware store). I keep the lights on from 6am until 10pm. But now that it's spring, there is a lot of light so I don't need to use them.

Your indeterminate tomato plant will need some kind of physical support-- this could be a traditional tomato cage or you could tie it up to a window.

The flowers will need a little help to become pollinated!

Lastly, and most importantly, how do you get fruit? At first I had flowers but no fruit. Then I realized that there were no insects flying into my flowers to spread the pollen around. In order to mimic those bugs, once you have flowers on your plant, give the flowers a gentle shake once a day to get that pollen spread around!

Starting to ripen...

Ready to eat!

If you decide to grow an indoor tomato, let me know how it goes!