Cultivating The Love Apple

Here’s some pictures of my toms taken yesterday on March 1st. That’s their 1 month birthday since they were planted. Hmmm, but would that be their conception day and their actual birthday be when they were born (emerged) from the soil? When does tomato life begin? I don’t know if I want to get into this again. Anyway, here’s the pictures:

All Five

The Big One

Close Up

As you can see, I transplanted them into some 16 oz cups at about two weeks. Or when the first set of real leaves are bigger than those original seed leaves shown in the last post. I had these cups from last year. They have some drainage holes about an inch from the base to provide drainage and they are red and for some reason tomatoes like the color red and grow better when there’s red around. I’ve talked with Vicki about re-painting the house red, but it’s still in discussion. Oh, and I used a 50/50 mix of worm poo and standard potting soil in these cups. They really took off after being re-potted. I also just removed the seed leaves a few days ago and filled the cups up to the rim with soil. Tomatoes can develop roots right from the stems so when you’re starting them out you’re always burying them a bit deeper in the soil so they can develop a better root structure. And since they are basically weeds, you can remove some of the leaves, especially the ones lower down that aren’t getting very much light, and they’ll just keep marching on.

The next step is to just let them grow for a while. When they get 6-8 inches tall I’m going to move them to 4-inch pots. That will be in about another month. Then I might re-pot them one last time into 6-inch pots depending on how big they get. This is the first time I’m growing dwarf plants so I really don’t know. I’d like to move some where they can get actual sunlight at some point, too. And I don’t really expect any tomatoes off of them to be particularly tasty, since I’m growing them in my basement for the most part. But it’s still fun to grow them.

Mike

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 2nd, 2008 at 10:19 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.