Tomato Plants are Blooming

Just last week after I posted my entry into this blog I visited the plants and saw small buds were already present at the highest stem of the plant. It was flower buds. It was dark already so I couldn't get a decent picture so I shot a couple of pictures later in the week of flower buds.

Large Flower Buds with small new flower buds in the middle.

The Flower Buds where growing out of the stem.

These flowers have bloomed already

I noticed that all the flowers that have bloomed are facing downwards not upwards like other flowers. Perhaps could be a way of making sure that the flowers are protected from water. 

Once a plant starts to produce flower buds it still tries to grow higher and new flower buds appear on new stem growth the above the old flower buds.

I made some measurement on plant height and leaf counts

From the samples I took I noticed that the number of leaves seemed to be linked with the height of the plants. It would be an obvious observation but I noticed that some values didn't match up  like the 9 cm plant with 16 leaves when a 12 cm plant had only 8 leaves. So I decided to look at the position of the plants I noticed that plants in the middle of the plot seemed to have more leaves than those at the ends of the plots. The plants at the end of the plots had the where the largest plants in the plot. It maybe that the competition of plants the middle of the plot for sunlight and nutrients could be driving the larger leaf count.  I'll do more observations to check this out.

Now that the plants have the height of 62 to 108 cm I've noticed that the branches grow in a clock wise direction. It's like the plant has a built in system that determines the angle where its branches would grow that would let its leaves absorb the maximum sunlight available.