Upside Down Tomatoes

Wouldn’t it be great to have a garden that produces abundance without the tedious work?  Growing tomatoes upside down alleviates pest issues, reduces the need to stake the plants, and makes for a bountiful visual display of red and green clusters.

We’re lucky in Philly to have the same climate that produces Jersey tomatoes, but even stores like Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods truck their tomatoes in from California or Canada.  If you start your tomato plants indoors in February (or just cheat and buy starters), by the end of the frosts in April you should have seedlings large enough to work with.

Ingredients

• Two buckets
• A bucket’s worth of good soil (mix in a bit of perlite to reduce the soil weight and increase water retention)
• A tomato plant
• A utility knife
• 5" x 5" of thick plastic (I use leftover soil bags)
• A drill with a 1” bit (optional)
• A place to hang the bucket roughly 5' off of the ground (or a smaller bucket to rest the bucket on top of)

Take a Bucket...

You can use any suitably strong bucket to grow them, but I like to use 5-gallon contractor buckets.  Where I live, finding them are easy—Washington Ave. west of Broad is studded with contractor stores whose dumpsters provide an almost endless supply.  Using a hole saw, I cut a 1" hole in the center of the bottom, but careful use of a sturdy utility knife could do the same job.  The sheet of plastic will be used to prevent dirt from falling out of the hole while being flexible enough to let the tomato vine grow.  Cut a slit in the piece of plastic from the middle to the outer edge.

Add a Plant...

Take your seedling, making sure not to disturb the roots, and fit the plastic sheet around the base.  Feed the assembly through the bucket (it helps to have a hook to hang the bucket on).  I've found that placing the plant on a sheet of newspaper and carefully rolling it up makes it a bit easier to feed through.  Remember, tomatoes will send out roots from any part of the stem that is in contact with the soil, so be sure to pull a few inches of the stem back up into the bucket—more roots = more water for your 'maters.

Once the plant is in place, start filling the bucket handful by handful with soil until the roots are covered by a few inches.  Once the roots are protected, dump away!  Leave about 10"-12" of space in the top of the first bucket, and place a piece of burlap over the top of the bucket.  Take the second bucket and push it down into the first bucket until it pushes the burlap against the soil.  You can then flip the entire two bucket assembly over.  Be careful--it will be top heavy, and can tip over if not places on steady ground.  Your tomatoes will now be able to grow as they normally would--towards the sun.

Grow Those Plants!

My mistake from years past was to flip the plants immediately, forcing them to expend energy growing out from under the bucket and towards the sun.  This would cause the main vine to grow into a U shape, and as the plant got heavier, would cause the stems to crack and turn woody.  Instead, I am now trying to keep the plants growing normally, until it's finally time to...

Flip Those Plants!

When your plant has flowered and is beginning to bear fruit, it's now time to flip.  Flip the plants over, taking care to support the stems until it's completely inverted.  Remove the extra bucket and burlap and top off the soil to about 4" below the top of the bucket.  Put an inch of mulch on top to keep the soil from drying out, and you should be good to go!

Repeat With Variations...

Peppers can be grown this way as well.  In fact, any plant that has fruit light enough not to break the stem should work.  Large squashes and melons probably won’t work—as the weight increases, the vines will stretch down and eventually break.  Zucchini and summer squash might work, but I’ll have to wait until next spring to find out.

Plants on top?

I had two transparent buckets that I planted some salad greens on top of, figuring that it was just empty space.  Within a month, the salad green roots had shot almost to the bottom of the bucket and were visibly competing with the tomato roots.  I chopped off the lettuce heads and turned and mulched the top few inches of soil.  Within a week, the tomato plant had gotten appreciably fuller and was able to go between waterings without wilting as it had been when the lettuce was stealing all of its water.  So although it might seem like the best use of space, in the end, you'll most likely end up with a smaller tomato yield.