Tomatoes & Peppers: Seed-Starting Day, 3 by Ozark

Ozark wrote:
Finally, it was time to start my tomato and pepper seeds indoors today. You folks in Texas and Louisiana are far ahead of me, but experience has shown that if I transplant into my garden before the first week of May, it doesn't do any good. Transplant too early, and my tomato and pepper seedlings just sit there in the cold soil, without growing, while the flea beetles and moles take a toll.

After ALMOST being convinced by Gymgirl to sow my seeds in bulk in larger containers, I reverted back to the way I've done it for the past 10 years. With my method, it's true that I have to do microsurgery to separate crowded seedling roots when transplanting up to larger containers - but, it works out OK and I've never lost a seedling. Anyway, I only leave seedlings in these egg cells until the first set of true leaves form - not long.

I use the same seed-starting containers year after year. They are plastic foam egg cartons that I've glued down to plywood bases after making a small drain hole in each cell. There are 24 cells on each base, and I've numbered the cells A1-24, B1-24, and C1-24. I didn't use "C" this year because I'm not starting any cabbage seedlings (I finally figured out that when my cabbages are ready to harvest, cabbage costs 39 cents a head in the market!).

So today I planted tomato seeds in wet Jiffy Mix in cells A 1 through 24, and pepper seeds in cells B 1 through 24. I plant three seeds per cell in a triangle pattern and I transplant and raise every seedling that comes up - so I could have as many as 72 tomato and 72 pepper seedlings to transplant and share with others. I don't use heat mats, but these go on top of our water heater in our furnace closet where the temperature stays between 75 and 80. I never get quite 100% germination, but usually pretty close.

The part of Gymgirl's method that I am going to use is to transplant seedlings up into cut-off drinking water bottles. The straight sides and depth of those will work just fine.

You can see in the third picture what tomato and pepper varieties I finally settled on this year, and how I keep track of them by numbering the egg cells. My garden season has finally begun!