I started cherry and pear tomatoes indoors at the beginning of March. I don’t have a grow light or an especially sunny windowsill out of the reach of my cats (my biggest complaint about this apartment, actually), so I stuck them under a table lamp and hoped for the best. I thought they were doing okay (I’ve never grown tomatoes from seed before), but then I saw Kirby’s tomato plants. Even though his are Better Boy tomatoes, not dainty little cherry or pear tomatoes like I’m growing, I was still shocked at how thick and straight the stems were–they really put my leggy little tomato plants to shame.
Photo taken on April 5th.
So, I dug out some flower pots and bought some potting soil and tried to tackle the task of saving these poor guys. Thanks to my copy of The Bountiful Container, I think the operation may have been a success. I buried the seedlings as deep as I could, which tended to be up to the seed leaves. The Bountiful Container says this encourages a complex root system, something that tomato plants really benefit from.
Photo taken on April 5th.
I couldn’t always get up to the seed leaves, as most of my plants were actually pretty tall–just stringy and spindly. You can tell by the pictures how puny they were.
Photo taken on April 15th.
Only ten days later, they’ve really made an improvement. This is the same plant! The stems have thickened considerably, and there’s a lot of new leaf growth. I transplanted four cherry and five pear tomato plants, and all of them are thriving.
I call these redneck greenhouses.
When I first set them out it I wasn’t sure if they would make it. I had been putting them outside during warm days, but I was afraid they were still a little too weak to make it on their own. I dug some plastic bottles out of our recycle bin and made these redneck green houses using an exacto knife. Tomatoes love heat and humidity, and these really helped to stave off the cold for their first few nights outside alone. I’ve taken the covers off now, however, and the plants are doing fine.
I’ll probably have to upgrade the containers at some pint, as many of these are pretty small (the one pictured is actually one of the largest ones), and I don’t want to plant them in the ground because we’ll be moving so soon. I’d like for the containers to not be too ugly, but I can’t afford to spend much (if any) money on them, either. Do you know of any interesting, attractive planter ideas that won’t be a pain to move?
Great work on the tomatoes! For inexpensive pots, you might try making your own paper mache pots with old newspaper. You would need one pot for the mold, but the rest would be basically free. Of course, you wouldn’t want to use glue because it would seep in. Instead, you could make a sticky mixture with two cups flour and one cup water. You could even buy colored tissue paper for the outer layers and have colored pots. (Full disclosure: I am not in any way crafty, so this colored thing could be a bad idea, but it sounds good in my head.)
Correction: I meant to type two cups flour and THREE cups water.
Thanks Kristen! That sounds like a great idea, even the colors part
Last year I spraypainted a lot of them blue and green, so that would allow me to stick with that color scheme. I’ll let you know how they turn out!