Tomatoes

Our tomato seeds have done well in one group, not so well in the other. The kids are certain they know which group is the 'treated' group! lol! We figured we'd better transplant some of them since they were falling over in the trays. We made note of how many from each group we were removing since the only information we need to send back to Tomatosphere is how many were planted and how many germinated in each group. We've been keeping track of that pretty much daily. Last Saturday, Nicholas and Matthew emptied the pots that had leftover bits of plant material in them from previous years, then Nicholas helped fill them with soil and transplant the tomatoes.

Unfortunately, we didn't do this the smart way. Actually, we pretty much did everything wrong. I know last year we left it so long that many of the tomatoes were dying in the small peat pellets and while we rescued most of them, many died or didn't survive transplanting. This year, we decided to do it earlier, but did it in the bright, hot sunlight in the backyard. We didn't take a week to acclimatize them to their new outdoor homes. We could have planted them deeper in the soil. Someone (ahem, me) may have forgotten to cover them one night when we thought there might be frost (and there was). So the net result is that as of today there are only two of the fourteen transplanted tomato plants that are still hanging in. The rest have turned white and shrivelled up.

There is hope, however. We still have a number of plants inside that were too small to transplant so we'll deal with them the 'proper' way. Lesson learned. This whole tomato plant in containers episode is an experiment in itself. Last year the ones we put in our garden didn't get enough sunlight so while they grew some and even produced a few tomatoes, nothing ripened. It was a little disappointing so we decided to try them in containers this year in order to be able to move them to where the sunlight is. If this doesn't work, we'll have an entire year to research the best ways to grow tomatoes!