Plant update! First tomato transplant
It's been a month now since my first tomato sprouts emerged. Since then, a bunch of other things have emerged too:
I admit they look a little sad in the picture above. Let me tell you what they've been through in the past month.
To prepare seedlings to be transplanted outdoors, you're supposed to prepare them in a process called "hardening off." You take your plants outside for a short period of time (15-30 minutes) in a relatively sheltered area like a covered porch. This exposes them to outside conditions, including breeze and less constant temperatures. You slowly ramp up the length of exposure each day, until finally you leave them out overnight, and then you can transplant them. Without the hardening off process, these sheltered babies will be completely shocked by the less controlled and peaceful outdoor environment when you transplant them outside.
What I didn't know is that tomato plants actually need to grow quite big before you start this process, and that my seedlings were nowhere near ready for this. You're supposed to wait until they outgrow the seed tray, then move them into larger individual pots, then harden them off and transplant outside. I put the poor seedlings outside when they were only a couple inches tall. I also didn't do a great job of shielding them from the wind that day. Aaand I might have forgotten to bring them inside for about an hour while I was in a work meeting.
Most of the seedlings only had their first pair of leaves, which are called the cotyledon leaves. These are like the starter leaves that come from inside the seed, and are not considered "true leaves." They're meant to help the seedling collect enough energy to grow its first pair of real leaves.
These poor fragile baby leaves did not like the hour worth of wind I subjected them to. By the time I remembered to bring them in, the baby leaves were yellow and withered. Over the course of the next few days, they slowly dried up and fell off. Luckily, the seedlings started growing their first true leaves just in time.
Once your seedlings have their first pair of true leaves, you can start fertilizing them. Seed starting mix is very light with no nutrients because its main goal is just to get the seeds to germinate. I bottom-watered the seedling tray with a diluted mix of liquid fertilizer.
The tomato seedlings started getting pretty tall (as you can see above), but there still wasn't much leaf growth. By now, they only have 1-3 true leaves each (most of them have 2). While researching that, I learned that they need to be transplanted into bigger pots at this point.
You can easily buy a 100-pack of 4" plastic nursery pots from amazon for like $15. But I don't think I need 100 pots, and there's already plenty of plastic out in the world that could be reused for that purpose. I started hoarding takeout and yogurt containers while Isaac silently judged me. We also had a few random plastic cups in the back of our kitchen cupboards.
A cool thing about tomato plants is that they can grow roots straight out of their stem when submerged in soil. So when you transplant them, you want to bury them up to their lowest leaves. This allows the plant to grow stocky instead of tall and lanky, while also helping it develop a strong root system. (Other plants do not like this treatment.)
I didn't have enough containers (or windowsill space), so I picked the strongest looking seedlings to transplant. Maybe by the time the weaker ones have grown more I'll magically have more containers and window space to transplant those too.
With the transplants buried up to their leaves and the baby leaves long gone, they pretty much look exactly the same now as they did when they first sprouted a month ago. Growing plants is such a patience game. But at least I know that these ones have stronger leaves, more roots, and a nice long buried stem that will soon grow even more roots.
Above you can see my assortment of random containers for the tomato transplants. I even used some mugs, because don't we all have too many random mugs in our kitchen? And yes, I cut open a tub of raisins too. The containers I scavenged are actually pretty ideal sizes. It was important for them to be taller than they are wide since I'd be burying the long stems. The sideways milk carton in the back is for my mint seedlings, which grow horizontally rather than vertically.
As you can see, they've pretty much taken over my west-facing window sill. I had to make sure to leave a little bit of room at the end so the cat could still sit in her spot, soaking up sun and watching over the front yard. At first I had the whole windowsill filled, and she was so determined to sit in her spot she started climbing onto the seed tray.
She's a good cat though. She doesn't try to eat the plants. She even doesn't mind catching some mist if she's sitting on the windowsill while I'm misting the plants. Meanwhile, my coworker said one of his cats ate all his broccoli seedlings, and puked them out onto a his kohlrabi seedlings 🤦♀️
If you noticed the two covered, larger pots on the right side of the windowsill, those are some experimental houseplants. In one I'm trying to grow an avocado, and in the other I have some medjool date pits. Since both of these fruits have large, hard pits, they take for-e-ver to germinate. I had them wrapped in a moist paper towel in a plastic bag for weeks before they grew their first taproot. I could have left them in there longer for the roots to grow more, but I got impatient and threw them in some dirt. They loosely covered plastic lids trap humidity, which helps the seed sprout. It'll probably be another month before I even see anything break the surface. These guys take forever, and in my climate, will never bear fruit. But they can be cute little dwarf trees.
Now it's time for me to wait again. I've seen people wait to transplant their tomatoes until they're about 6 inches tall, with a nice thick stem and multiple pairs of leaves. Feels like that's still a long way away from me, but maybe moving them to bigger pots will help them start growing faster. I'm still waiting for my other non-tomato seedlings to get bigger too. I have to remind myself that it's still not even May yet, I live in Boston, and planting outside is still a ways away.
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