Tomato Seedling Update 2015

Tricia and I were discussing today how time flies.  We have two "kids" in college and our 'baby' will be starting high school in the fall.  They sure do grow up fast! Time flies by in a blur.  In addition to our kids and my waistline (from winter gumbo eating), there's something else growing - our tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant.

It was about 12 days ago in This Post where we talked about getting our seeds started and placing them above the freezer in our laundry room to sprout.  Each day I've diligently sprayed the soil with water when I get home from work.  It is nice and toasty atop the freezer.  I placed a thermometer and it is 77 degrees up there. Perfect for coaxing some slumbering seeds to awaken from their nap.  The top of the freezer is also a storage spot for our egg cartons.  Since Spring is on its way the hens have started to lay a few more eggs each day and soon all the cartons will be filled with fresh country eggs.

I listened to the weather report today about the snowfall in the northeast and I remember our trip to South Dakota a month ago with the frigid temperatures. Brrrr!  It makes me feel a little guilty to think that I'm getting a shovel to dig a bit in the garden to prepare to put in our Irish Potato crop and our neighbors to the north are using their shovels to dig their way out of the snow.

Well, here are our tomato seedlings, jumping up out of the ground with vigor.  I planted about a week and a half late and I think that they are making up for lost time.  

It's Grow Time!

It looks like the germination percentage is about 95%, except for one variety (Riesentraube), whose germination is only about 5%.  I don't know what happened there.  You can see that the tomato cotyledons (first leaves) are green and healthy. We won't transplant into larger containers until they put on their first true leaves.

Tomato cotyledons

Here is a list of the different heirloom tomato varieties we planted this year:

• Pink Brandywine
• Amish Paste
• Abu Ruwan
• Riesentraube
• Organic Beefsteak
• Black Krim
• Gypsy
• Black from Tula
• Big Rainbow
• Mortgage Lifter
• Thessaloniki
• Moneymaker

They are all open-pollinated, heirloom varieties.  Our favorite, by far, is the Black Krim!  As you can notice from the picture below, the seedlings grow toward the sunlight that floods through a window in our laundry room.  I need to pull down the shade, lest the plants get too "leggy."

Growing toward the sunlight

The peppers take a little bit longer to germinate and although we planted all of these seeds on the same day, the peppers are just now popping up.  These are the pepper varieties we planted this year:

• Buren Red Bell Pepper
• Cayenne Pepper
• Sweet Chocolate Pepper
• Purple Beauty Bell Pepper
• Anaheim Pepper
• Criolla Sella Pepper
• Jalapeno Pepper

Peppers Popping out of the soil

And finally, pulling up the rear, is the Eggplant.  If you look very closely, you can see the little seedling that is about to make its presence known.

Eggplant seedling

We'll keep a close eye on our seedlings and baby them until they are ready to transplant into a larger container.  The small seed pots they are in now don't have a lot of soil and they dry out quickly.  I normally will separate the seedlings when two or more are growing and transplant them each to one pot.  Then when the plants have grown and the risk of frost is gone, I'll replant them all directly into the garden row.