A Little Room To Stretch Out

Winter time is a time where we eat a lot of gumbo with white rice.  It is warming and soothing.  And filling.  It is usually too wet and muddy and nasty to get outside and do any gardening or manual labor that I normally do for the sheer love of it.  Working outside provides another benefit - it keeps me in shape.  In winter, though, the weather isn't conducive to that and as a result, I eat too much gumbo and do too little work and thus, come early February, I always notice that my Wrangler jeans have shrunk for some reason.  It is the oddest occurrence.  Because as soon as the weather gets nicer, my jeans expand and are comfortable again.  Go figure.

I say all that because that is what I thought about when looking at our tomatoes.  They are growing and running out of room to grow in their seed pots.  Their roots have filled every centimeter of space.  Many simply clip the smaller plant and let the dominant one survive, but I look at that as a waste.  These tomato plants - all of them - are going to produce fruit.  I'm not thinning out a single one.

Running out of room to grow

This weekend, in a job that took a couple of hours, I carefully and tediously, used a plastic knife and spoon to dig the root ball of the tomato seedlings out of the seed pot.  Then I painstakingly separated the conjoined plants and placed them in their very own cup where they have room to stretch out and grow. 

I used some of the soil that we made IN THIS BLOG POST to put in the very bottom of the cup.  The composted chicken manure that makes up 1/3 of the mix ought to give the tomatoes some 'get up and go' and make them turn a healthy green.  They had run out of nutrients and had an unhealthy color to them.  I re-potted them in Community Coffee cups.  Perhaps there's some residual caffeine in the cup that will wake them up and rejuvenate them as well.

This is just one of our varieties of heirloom tomatoes called Black from Tula.  They formerly occupied a little four-pack and were root bound.  Now they have room to grow.  It's almost as if they loosened their belts a notch after eating too much gumbo and now can expand freely.

Here is the finished product after separating all the tomatoes and putting them back underneath the grow light.

This weekend I'll need to do the same with the pepper plants.