Today is indoor tomato seed sowing day. If they germinate and up pot well, they should be ready for hardening off in mid May and then transplanted out to my raised beds in late May/early June, depending on our temperature at the time.
Here is my garden set up. I had agricultural fleece over my beds for the winter, as I overwintered garlic, asparagus, and a purple collard tree in the beds.
I pulled the agricultural fleece back last week and removed the dried leaf mulch I had put over the beds to protect the soil over the winter. It looks like some settling occurred over the winter months, so I plan on adding some compost to bring level up before planting more.
I hand raked in some lime as well as organic vegetable and tomato granular fertilizer, and noticed my red wrigglers appear to be getting active. I quartered up a butternut squash and pushed it lightly into the soil as food for the worms, but something kept digging the squash quarters out, although they didn’t seem to eat anything from them.
I finally used a spade and dug deeper into the soil, completely burying the squash quarters. I figure the red wrigglers will find them deeper down. So far, whatever was disturbing them before hasn’t bothered them since burying them deeper.
I grew eight varieties last year and saved seeds from all eight. This is my chart of how I sowed them in my seed starting tray.
This is a 36 coco coir pellet starting tray. My intent is to transplant two of each variety into my raised beds. I put two seeds from a variety into each pellet, and did two pellets per variety. If I have 100% germination, I’ll have double the plants I need, but I know germination rates tend to be much lower than that, especially with self saved seeds.
As I only needed 16 pellets, I removed the others in a pattern I found easy to chart and have stored them to be used next year.
Not to mention, the San Marzano style seeds were saved from tomatoes that were grown from seeds I saved the year before. So these are second generation seeds. Since they were not isolated from other varieties when I grew them two years ago, they seemed to grow smaller than the crop I had the previous year. But they were plentiful and tasty. They also weren’t isolated last year, and won’t be this year, so I’ll see what I wind up with. If too far from the original, I won’t save those seeds this year, and start fresh next growing season.
The seeds sown and covered over with a light layer of coco coir.
The humidity dome on top until germination.
This is going to sound out of the ordinary, but I’m germinating my seeds in my bathtub. I don’t have any place to set up a heat mat, and I have found the warmest place in the house to be in the enclosed bathroom with no window. So, until germination the seed tray will sit on the floor of the bathtub. The shower curtain will be drawn closed, and the bathroom door will be kept closed. I figure the occasional light from the bathroom being used won’t disturb the germination process too much.
We’ll see what happens in a week or so.
