It's Tomato Starting Day!

[Tormahto]

A9E9104E-6518-4E1B-BDE0-AE3D5D70F5A8.jpegDid I over water? These are exstreme bush tomato plants I read curling was normal thry look sad

At first look I said to myself, WOW that seed starter looks moist. And then I read your comment at the bottom. If those were my seedlings, they likely would be all dead from damping off. So, you're doing good.

I try to only water from the bottom, and at the sides of the container at the top, keeping the watering away from the stem as much as possible on small seedlings.

[AKgardener]

Ya they definitely didn’t make it my own fault! Try and try again

[GoDawgs]

Yesterday was the first day that the tomatoes went out on the front porch to start hardening off. I brought them in last night as it was getting down to 45. But this morning , out they went for another day of play in the sun. I'll probably be doing the morning-evening in-and-out game for a little while.



I also took an inventory of tomato pots and cages this morning. This afternoon I will clean and sanitize them. The game plan is to go get the pickup load of potting mix this coming Thursday with potting happening Friday, weather permitting.

[AKgardener]

Those look so healthy! I woke up this morning with Idea to plug in my heat lamps to my mini greenhouse test to see how warm it gets during the day if it’s decent do the same thing go out during the day come in at night !!! More soil to

[Sue_CT]

I left my Texas Tomato Cages in the garden all winter. Bad gardener. Bad, bad gardener. I will need to sanitize. How do you do it? I was thinking of leaving them there, removing anything visible still clinging to them and just wiping them down with an antibacterial wipe.

[GoDawgs]

I left my Texas Tomato Cages in the garden all winter. Bad gardener. Bad, bad gardener. I will need to sanitize. How do you do it? I was thinking of leaving them there, removing anything visible still clinging to them and just wiping them down with an antibacterial wipe.

I washed all my tomato buckets this afternoon, let them dry, sprayed the insides with a 10% bleach solution and let the sun dry them again. My cages stay outside year round. They'll get sprayed with the bleach solution when it gets near time needing them.

[brownrexx]

My tomato cages stay in the garden and out in the weather all year. I don't do anything to disinfect them in the spring. I figure that the below freezing temperatures as well as full sun, ice, sleet, snow and rain take care of cleaning them for me.

[PlainJane]

I left my Texas Tomato Cages in the garden all winter. Bad gardener. Bad, bad gardener. I will need to sanitize. How do you do it? I was thinking of leaving them there, removing anything visible still clinging to them and just wiping them down with an antibacterial wipe.

I make up a bleach solution in a bucket then don rubber gloves and wipe the cages down.
Let dry in the sun.

[GoDawgs]

Planting out the tomatoes has been postponed until next week. We have heavy rain coming in tomorrow afternoon and more Wednesday afternoon through Thursday. Then on Friday and Saturday low temps are supposed to be 38 and 41. The rain will make the load of potting mix so heavy. The vendor has it piled on a concrete pad so it will hopefully drain out by the time we go fetch a load.

[AKgardener]

I’m not even going to try it yet I went out and got more heat lamps and do a test run see if it stays warm enough but I’m still looking at mid May

[JRinPA]

My tomato cages stay in the garden and out in the weather all year. I don't do anything to disinfect them in the spring. I figure that the below freezing temperatures as well as full sun, ice, sleet, snow and rain take care of cleaning them for me.

I think I tried spraying some with bleach solution one year. And only one year. I couldn't see any difference between sprayed and not sprayed. Except for the hand cramps.

[AKgardener]

I wish I knew what the heck is going on with my tomato seedling any idea? Should I start over?

[AKgardener]

Sorry for the big pictures I didn’t over water this time I don’t think they like the pods but I replanted all of them

[Sue_CT]

Photos are too large, load VERY slowly, and are a little blurry. My guess is overwatering. You might try backing up a bit so you can get better focus and nice clear shots and maybe choose a slightly smaller picture to post. I know sometimes things seem to load slowly on this site so maybe it is just timing, things could slow down when they are making updates to the site, etc. The cotyledons naturally turn yellow and fall off as the plants mature. But not sure if the true leaves are also showing problems. If so, you do have a problem. It could be drying out too much followed by watering too heavily. I wouldn't think they should be in need of fertilizer at that size.

[JosephineRose]

Get them out of the jiffy pots, pop them up into a nutritious seedling mix in a larger container and then put out some yellow sticky traps. My seedlings have looked like that when one of two things was happening: fungus gnats, or salts from coco coir tapping them out.

Last year it was a fungus gnat attack and they just never thrived.

[JosephineRose]

I have become fairly obsessive about cleaning and sanitizing everything with respect to seedlings. We have a massive Russet mite problem here, and I have had fungus gnats wipe seedlings out without sterilization of tools and seed start mixes.

I would love to be casual and not care, but I’ve had bad luck and learned the hard way.

Yesterday I started 56 varieties from seed. That was not the plan, but I am doing a lot of trials this year in 5 gallon buckets so I just went for broke. I spent hours prepping to get ready for the actual sowing doing all the cleanup: pot, surface and tray washing and mixing up my seed start mix and then sterilizing it too.

[Tormahto]

Scanning the 10 day forecast, it looks like next Tuesday might be the beginning of a warm up. Counting back 4 days for the germination time, I think that I'll be sowing a few (undecided at this point) varieties on Friday.

Right now, there's a good chance of rain from tonight through Saturday.

[AKgardener]

Tryed to remove photos sorry there large I didn’t overwater this time it seems that it truly is not my year to start tomatoes! I’m gonna get a different brand of of soil and try to repot the others thanks for looking I’m still new at this .I’ve decided to just go buy all my tomatoes at out local nursery in the next 2 weeks I’ll stick to the micro,s for starting thry are thriving

[GoDawgs]

@AKgardener , see if you have a setting on your camera that will take pics at a smaller size. Or if you have a photo processing program that came with your computer, it should have a way to resize, crop, etc your pics. I have Microsoft now and the photo program that came with it issn't as intuitive as the old Apple I had but the photo program has four sizes to choose from and I use the Small. Great for posting in forums and for inserting into e-mail.

[brownrexx]

Day 4 and my tomatoes are popping up!