Decisions decisions

Things always get more complicated than you think.

The more things I read the more decisions that we are faced with.

One example is what to do about the seedcoats that get stuck to the top of the seedlings. Most people moisten them and pull them off. Colin thinks that this is unnecessary he said something about tomatoes never surviving all of these years if they couldn't grow without someone pulling the seeds off of the seedlings. So we are going with the patience route.

The other thing is whether we need to "pot up" or not. Potting up is repotting the plants once or twice during the indoor growing phase. There is a raging debate about whether to pot up or not. To pot or not to pot that is the question.

Stuck seedcoats

From Tomatoes

Legginess == Bad

We adjusted the plants today so that they are very close to the lights. This is to prevent 'legginess' which is when the plants grow too tall and thin.

We also watered the plants for the first time since we planted.

Plants close to the light

Varieties

Varieties that we have planted:

Lemon Boy - I had two of these plants last year and am absolutely in love with the flavor.

Sweet 100 - another salad all star for me.

Better Boy - not my favorite but I had a packet of seeds around (from 2003) that still tested 80% viable so why not.

Roma hybrid (I think they are Viva Italia) my wife is a big roma fan so I had to start some of these too. This is another packet from 2003 (I guess I could be accused of over-thriftyness).

Nothing too exciting, although as I said I am really a fan of the Lemon Boy.

Accounting

We just added up all of the money that we spent so far on the project. The biggest expense was the timer for the lights at $10. Next was the soil mix (2 bags) at $7.32.

All told we have spent about $35.21.

We bought 5-6 new packets of seeds, many of the seeds are left over from the last time that I tried this in 2003!

At first we were unsure whether to use those seeds, but we followed some instructions and tested a batch of seeds from that lot and amazingly enough they germinated.

Germination Day

We checked all of the pots yesterday and there was no activity visible.

We have done a little improvement this week, including moving the other shop light into position.

We have the heater set at 75 degrees, trying to maintain a temp between 70 and 80 for germination.

This afternoon I peeked into the pots and was surprised to see many of the tomato plants had germinated!

We took the bags off of the tomato trays and turned the heater down to 65 degrees.

Tiny Seedlings

Planting

On Monday March 23, 2009 we planted the seeds.

One of the resources that we used was this article on GardenWeb. GardenWeb is such an awesome site!

A Very Useful Article on Starting Seeds at GardenWeb

We planted tomatoes (4 kinds), jalapenos, herbs (5 kinds) and cantelope (those were kind of an impulse buy).

I ended up having to run out for more soil mix and clear plastic bags to cover the pots during the germination phase. (Its really not a project unless you forget some stuff right)?

A friend loaned us a space heater to warm up the 'Greenhouse' which is the basement crawlspace and its been about 60 degrees Fahrenheit down there. There are already shop lights overhead which originally we were going to lower to get them close to the plants. We ended up putting the plants on a card table which got them pretty close to the lights and also up where the air was warmer.

Here are some photos of the proceedings:

Lots of seeds



The Greenhouse



Moistening the seeds



Ready to grow



All done for the night

Shopping

On Saturday March 21, 2009 we hit the trail to buy supplies.

We needed a timer to control the lighting. We went to Menards and settled on a middle of the road model that was heavy duty yet not too expensive.

We proceeded to Stein's for the flats, pots, starter mix, seeds, etc.

When we got home we had hopes of starting the actual planting but we ran out of time. Well so far so good, hope to make time for planting soon.

Preamble

This winter, my son Colin and I decided that we were going to start tomato plants inside.

This is a chronicle of our garden/engineering exploits (Gardeneering)!