As Thomas Jefferson once said, "look to your soil"! Our sandy soils need to have compost or other fertilizers worked in, and I suspect that even in pots, a good garden soil with compost might improve the overall yield. I have an earthbox, and would recommend it for tomatos and roses. Kohlrabi and bulb Fennel are two things I have success with (in the ground) that I did not notice have been mentioned. Mint, parsley, onions and greens, such as collards, mustards and kales, and yellow or purple pole or bush beans. Broccoli and cabbage do well. But none of it did anything at all for me, till I fixed up my Soil First. Also, I spray with liquid nutrients and organic pest controls, such as hot pepper wax, bt for worms, and pyola oil for general insects. Oh, and shield-all is a product that controls tomato diseases. It is not as hard as it sounds, since i mix it all up in a small spray bottle with plenty of water. I leave that in the garden, and whenever I am out there, it is easy to keep after the spraying. Gardens Alive! sells all the above stuff, and also Gardener's supply is another reliable company I can recommend from experience. The best advice was not to get discouraged! Each year seems to be different, and I never know what will grow and what will die. This never stops me from trying, and I always get Something from all my efforts here in North Miami, where it has been said that our Winter growing season is like a Northern Summer, so many Northern seeds do well here.

If your climate is dry you can let the tomatoes sprawl on the ground and they will sink the rootlets into the ground and get moisture from a wider area. Most have gotten so used to tying tomatoes up that you seldom see gardens that tomatoes sprawl in.

To add to what Jean wrote, they're called adventitious roots and when the make contact with soil those white squiggly adventitious roots penetate the soil and make regular roots. As far as I know tomatoes are one of the few that I know of the can form roots all along the stems when in contact with soil. And b'c of that quite a few folks plant their plants by trenching, which means planting then horizontally in a shallow trench rather than vertically as most do. Based on your experience with that container seeds place I'd let it go and look for varieties at the more established trustworthy tomato seed sources of which there are many. Carolyn

Thanks for the answer. She doesn't think the description quite fits. She said the area is woody and not spongy. But I did some reading too and I read that old galls can get a woody interior, This reference seems quite relevant: "Crown gall first appears as small overgrowths on the stem (trunk), crown, and roots – usually near the soil line, frequently at a graft union" However, this reference in the same article seems to go in another direction: "Since the crown gall bacterium infects only through wounds, the disease can be confused with the callus overgrowths that often form at wounds or graft unions." full article: https://ipm.illinois.edu/diseases/rpds/1006.pdf Is her pic beyond "callus overgrowths"? It seems like the plant will eventually suffer if it is galls and as as they encircle the trunk. But yet its going strong for now so is there a reasonable argument to wait-and-see? Reminds me of a medical tv drama I just watched where the surgeon needs to decide whether or not to remove the stomach of a patient because they can't determine if the growths are cancerous or not!