Well, apparently my second-most popular post at the moment is the one about pinching tomatoes!
(the most popular is my Windows Live vs Picasa review post, which I have updated a few times in response to comments)
Expect to see many tomato-pinching-related posts in future!
I LOVE pinching tomatoes!
I even do it when I'm at other people's houses, just walk right up and shave their tomatoes' armpits, too.
It's kind of like coleus... once you know that they're not supposed to flower, that you are supposed to pinch them down to keep them bushy, you can't walk through somebody's garden and just smile and nod at the blue spikes of coleus flowers. It's a compulsion: you must DO something about it. Or at least, I must.
My secret pleasure about pinching tomatoes: I usually manage to get the suckers when they're tiny, but every once in a while, with twelve tomato plants or more on the go, I miss one and the sucker manages to attain a decent size (like in the original tomato-pinching post). And I love it! It is at once a thrill and a horror to heartlessly snap off a living section of this coddled tomato plant that I have painstakingly raised from seed. It feels so brutal; I tell the plant it's for its own good...
At the cottage we tried cutting up the pinched-off parts of the tomato and soaking in water overnight to make a spray for aphids -- I'll let you know if this was successful.
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