Propagation: Help with propagating vegetable plants!, 1 by JimKennard

JimKennard wrote:
Propagation entails using plant parts, rather than seeds to grow the next generation of plants. Several benefits include shorter time to harvest, less cost, since the vegetation is already available from the previous harvest, etc.

With potatoes, you cut out a piece of the potato that has an "eye" and plant it. That's propagation. The same thing is done with sweet potatoes, but more often the stems and leaves are used. And propagating tomatoes simply requires cutting off a sucker stem and planting it.

The picture below shows pruning sucker stems from tomatoes, but if you want to propagate them, let them grow bigger before cutting them.

What Dr. Mittleider did in the situation you see above is to take samples of only the best plants growing in the area, plant in greenhouse/nursery conditions, including regular feeding and watering, etc. He continued to feed and water throughout the growing season, and what you see is the result.

By the way, the big ones took only 7 months, whereas the skinny ones had taken 10 1/2 months to grow.

Jim