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We bought a cherry tomato plant. Since we do not have room in our window, we planted it in a pot inside the house, and put a lamp directly above it. It grew for several weeks and gave some fruits, but now its leaves are becoming yellow:

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Is there a way to save it?

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Erel Segal-Halevi
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1 Answers1

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Nope, your plant has done its job. You did well to actually get a few tomatoes growing indoors. Next year match the pot size to the plant; small plant small pot, grows bigger, roots start coming out of the bottom, transplant to a slightly larger pot. Too much soil, holds too much water, the little plant can't suck it up, dries by evaporation too slowly and root rot, other fungal diseases proliferate.

What kind of light have you been using? Need a real grow light, florescent. Keep harvesting tomatoes as soon as the tomatoes begin to ripen and finish on a dark, cool shelf and this helps the plant to set more flowers and make more tomatoes...and your plant will last longer. They are supposed to be perennial in the tropics, greenhouses, indoors with good light proper maintenance and should last at least 2 or 3 years. I've never grown tomatoes past one season. Mimicking seasonal natural day/night hours helps set fruit. Make sure you don't fertilize too heavily with nitrogen and pollination is more complicated in doors as well, did you manually pollinate?

stormy
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  • The lamp is a white fluorescent, 15 Watt, 6500K. Is this sufficient? – Erel Segal-Halevi Oct 14 '16 at 09:24
  • IMHO, next year try to find a place outside (ev. on roof). Tomatoes doesn't require very sunny places: they are vines, so they usually grow below trees. So placing in shadow (of a tree) should be ok (especially on cherries, who tend to grown in a vine style), they just don't love cold places,. – Giacomo Catenazzi Oct 14 '16 at 10:10
  • Careful using generalities as absolutes. Indeterminate tomato vines are probably man made. Not all vines are shade loving. There is a hard and fast rule, to make lots of flowers/fruit a plant has to love the sun. I've had a few tomato plants stuffed in a shady place and they never produced. Cherry vines? Or Cherry (prunus) trees? The cool thing about a vine plant is that it gets to TRAVEL to the sunlight. – stormy Oct 15 '16 at 01:55
  • It takes a lot of energy and resources to grow vegetables!! The way plants get their energy is not by ingestion but by SOLAR. Too little solar no matter how adept a plant's efficiency, just will not translate into food for us!! – stormy Oct 15 '16 at 01:57
  • For a decent grow light you need to have around 5,000 lumens per bulb minimum...I use 95,000 lumens or 600 watts HPS (high pressure sodium), hey I am a bit rusty with lighting fixtures...go to a cannabis grow store/site. They KNOW the lighting and growing of a plant intimately. There might even be better technology that happened in the last 6 months. Even the higher wattage CFL (compact florescent light) are used for grow lights (mostly understory or under the canopy of cash crops and I am not convinced works). Get 'The Encyclopedia of Cannabis' by Jorge Cervantes! – stormy Oct 15 '16 at 02:12
  • Erel, your light is NOT at all good enough. The pots are too large for the plants, too much moisture in the soil these baby plants can't even reach if you LET the soil dry out. You need at the minimum 300 watts and if you want tomatoes you need to change from the 'blue' lights 6500K for vegetative growth to reproductive light; red and yellow or 2000 to 3500K. Would it be possible to get a response from you so that we can help answer your question? – stormy Oct 24 '16 at 21:26