Multiply Your Tomato Plants for Free with This Simple Method

4 min readJul 8, 2020

Maybe you fancied yourself a gardener before this pandemic started, or maybe you deemed yourself a glorified plant-killer. One thing is for certain; people have been forced to lock-down and occupy their time at home.

Internal growth is a lot like ensuring growth in a garden. It’s painful, uncomfortable, and produces satisfying rewards.

The moment you pick your first ripe tomato or watch blooms turn into fruit is the moment you begin to have faith in new growth amidst an America that wildly politicizes the most human of things.

So, what’s the point of gardening if even analogizing it makes it seem difficult?

You must be wondering what satisfying products this hobby can bring, after all the sweating is said and done.

Gardening — the sustainable, life-giving, hidden gem of COVID-19

Here’s why you should garden. One packet of seeds likely costs you anywhere from 1–5 dollars, not mentioning seeds you can easily scrape out of your grocery store produce and sprout for free.

In that seed packet, you have access to a nearly exponential world of possibilities. Plant one cherry tomato seed, cultivate it, and watch it grow into a high-yielding plant with 100s of fruit.

And here’s where things really get exciting. I’ll let you in on a secret; you can multiply most of what you grow for free. That’s right, each tomato plant has the potential to be reproduced if you take the following steps.

How to Multiply Tomato Plants by Re-growing Side Shoots

The tomato plant clipping is identified where the dotted line sits in the circle. Pinch or clip off this part of the plant, so long as the blooms have not already opened or started fruiting.

This method of reproducing tomato plants is highly effective and requires only a cup of clean water, sunlight, and a tomato plant side shoot.

The side shoot is where a new growth forms on one of the main stems. You can identify it in the picture above where the dotted line is.

This part of the plant forks out and will likely have a few soon-to-be blooms. As long as those blooms are brand new and unopened, you can pinch off this part of the plant — the side shoot.

Growing Roots on the Side Shoot

Your next step is to grow roots on this clipping, more formally known as “propagating”.

All you have to do to make this happen is to place the shoot in a clear cup or glass of clean water. Set it in a windowsill or outside on a stable surface where it can absorb sunlight, and wait! (Make sure you change the water regularly.)

After about a week or so, depending on the light conditions, roots will start to grow out of the stem. Once they are about 1–2 inches long, the propagation is ready to plant and re-grow.

Planting the New Tomato Plant

The propagated plant will give you a new tomato plant much faster than you would get merely by planting a new seed. This speeds up the process by *weeks!*

Your next step is to plant the cutting that has grown sufficient roots. Plant the cutting in a pot with some rich, organic potting soil and let the plant grow more roots and harden off before transplanting to a garden bed or bigger pot.

Here’s a tip: The higher up the soil goes on the stem, the more room there is for the plant to root into the pot, which means faster, better growth.

Benefits of this Method

Perhaps the biggest benefit to this method of getting new tomato plants, besides the great cost factor, is that it’s super fast and super effective.

Whereas planting a new tomato plant from seed will take you months to generate fruit, propagating a cutting from a mature tomato plant will ensure that the plant makes blooms, and ultimately fruit, within several weeks.

What’s great is that you can do this with as many cuttings as you like over the course of the growing season!

So, get to multiplying! Make some for your friends. Spread a little growth into this pandemic-ridden world, and start gardening.

That’s one of my favorite beauties of having a garden — it feels like you are creating something from essentially nothing. One might even call it magic.

Bonus Tip

Here’s one of my favorite tomato varieties to grow — the Super Sweet 100 Tomato. It’s a cherry tomato variety known for its sweet flavor and indeterminate size.

This basically means that you won’t know how tall the plant will grow until it’s stopped growing. With proper fertilizing and care, these babies can grow taller than you!

While determinate plants have a determined height they reach in their growing season, indeterminates do not.

What’s special about the 100 variety is that it gets its name because one plant, when cultivated well, is said to produce 100s of tomatoes! In the right regions, basing off my region in West Virginia, it will yield into late summer.