Tomatoes & Peppers: Seed-Starting Day, 2 by Ozark

Ozark wrote:
I transplanted my tomato seedlings up into cut-off drinking water bottles today. Thanks again for that idea, Gymgirl.

A further bright idea I had: When I transplant these into the garden next month and before I take these trays outdoors, I'm going to use my Dremel tool to carefully cut around each bottle - at the bottom edge of the label this time. That will leave a plastic ring around the top of each root ball, which coincidentally has the variety name written on it. That ring can be moved UP the stem when I plant these seedlings deep, and I'll position each ring sticking up out of the soil to protect against cutworms. Cutworms are bad around here when I first put young seedlings out - if there's no protection, a lot of seedlings get cut right off at the soil level.

I'm going to wait awhile before transplanting my peppers up into water bottles. Some of those are still tiny - I had a new one sprout just this morning, 21 days after I planted the seed!

For tomatoes, I ended up with 11 Sweet Ozark Orange, 5 F2 generation of the original cross (seeds saved in 2010), 2 Nevas (from Finland), 4 Tarasenko Pink (from Ukraine by way of Finland), and 7 Big Beef. Sadly, none of the Donaci Dolenjski tomatoes from Slovenia came up - but two varieties of Slovenian sweet peppers did!