Tomato suckers growing on leaves?

[SnazzyGator]

Almost a year ago now I planted a "Tomato Rocket" I had lying around, which is supposed to be "Early Girl" tomatoes. I live in South Florida, zone 10b, which has been way too hot to see success with tomatoes. Since this plant didn't die, I just let it continue growing even though it was dropping every flower it bloomed.

Well a couple weeks ago, I noticed a new sucker growing up from the bottom of the plant, and the main stem had withered. I chopped the withered stem off and I'm going to just reroute the sucker to grow up the pole instead. Though everything above 2ft withered, the first 8 leaves or so of the main stalk seemed healthy, albeit very dark and leathery (Nitrogen abundance?), and strangely enough on just one of the leaves, two new clumps of suckers started growing!

I couldn't find any information on this anywhere, and was wondering if anyone might know what's going on here? I'm not trying to make this plant viable so much as I'm curious as to what's caused this to happen. It doesn't seem unreasonable that this could happen, just very interesting.

 

[YumYum]

That sure looks like a heavily nitrogen filled leaf to me. Maybe when you cut the stem the nutrients had to go somewhere but you said the stem was already withered so I wouldn't think it was already pulling that many nutrients from the soil at the time of the cutting. That is wierd.

 

[pepper]

I've never seen that before. Strange.

 

[Chuck]

High concentrations of nitrogen in tomato plants can cause cell growth abnormalities among other things, and I think that is what is happening here.

 

[SnazzyGator]

High concentrations of nitrogen in tomato plants can cause cell growth abnormalities among other things, and I think that is what is happening here.

That's what I was thinking of. It's strange because I haven't fertilized them, they're just on cheapo Miracle-gro since repotting, but the bottom leaves kept getting darker and darker and the rest of the leaves never thrived. Now that the top withered I guess they decided to get a little creative lol.

edit; they've occasionally had cleaned trimmings from other plants tucked into the soil to help fertilize, but mostly genovese basil flowers and other tomato leaves.

 

[Chuck]

That's what I was thinking of. It's strange because I haven't fertilized them, they're just on cheapo Miracle-gro since repotting, but the bottom leaves kept getting darker and darker and the rest of the leaves never thrived. Now that the top withered I guess they decided to get a little creative lol.

edit; they've occasionally had cleaned trimmings from other plants tucked into the soil to help fertilize, but mostly genovese basil flowers and other tomato leaves.

I know that Miracle Grow products are garbage but I have never seen it do this.