Damaged my Tomato plant tap root when repotting...help!

Hey everyone,

So I'd started to grow a tomato plant from seed recently and then decided to move it from the small tray and into a pot. During repotting I'd damaged the thick central root. 30 minutes later the whole plant lost all stability and totally drooped onto the compost.

The next day it had started to stand upright again. Around 3 weeks later the plant is still alive but doesn't really appear to be growing. Do I need to just accept defeat with this now and start again or can it be saved?

 

Hi PhilC, Plant it deeper, the stem will produce more roots. The pot looks a little large, if you have a KFC/McDonalds type cup use this.

 

Ah thank you!!! I'm glad I asked as I was going to ditch this attempt.

 

I wouldn't worry too much about that ... it will just be functioning on less root and thus take a while to recover.

However, it will now presumably have a lot of compost, relative to the root volume, in that pot? If so be very careful with watering ... it takes a while for any "overpotted" plant to use all the water available, so over watering will mean a long period before the plant can take up the water and risk of it drowning in that interval. I judge when a plant is drying out by the weight of the pot (with familiarity you can judge that in your hand, but no harm in actually putting it on the scales). You could weigh it now, leave it until it starts to wilt, weight it again (and water it!), and then use that weight range as a guide. Once its recovered you can stop doing that ... when it has more root, and top, it will drink more anyway, so you'll find the interval between Heavy and Light will get shorter, so even if you, then, overwater it won't take the plant very long to take up the excess.

Good to hear it has recovered. The "slumped" would have been inability to get enough water to support the plant above; in your case reduction of roots but that can also happen with disruption to roots. Its recovered now, but i would have put it out of direct light for 24 hours, covered the top with a freezer bag to stop evaporation from the leaves, and keep the humidity up. Spraying the plant with water, so the leaves are moist, would have helped too (you could do that now, it will reduce plant stress).

The spot it is in doesn't look like it has much light ... might just be the time of the day, or overcast that day ... but it will help to get the plant on the sunniest windowsill, close to the glass, and put a sheet of white card (not tinfoil) behind it to reflect light back.

Personally I don't do that when potting on. It results in the plant being lower in the (new) pot, reducing the depth of available new compost for the existing roots to utilise downwards, so they have to grow upwards to find fresh compost which isn't their normal behaviour. It takes a fair bit of time for new roots to form from the stem, to take advantage of the compost added on top, so I favour "more fresh compost below" as I think the roots develop faster into that, than more-up-top.

I do deep-plant when planting out as the plant then has unlimited soil for roots to develop into. Actually rather than a deep hole (which puts the rootball nearer to my subsoil), I cross-plant two adjacent plants. So instead of two planting holes I dig a two-plant-trench, lay the plants in them facing each other and crossing over, so the stem of the rootball on the left trails along the trench and up the support on the right, and vice versa.