Re-potting

Today I re-potted the tomato seedlings, as the greenhouse advised me to do. Each of the Amish Paste tomatoes now has its own 3-inch pot. As it turns out, I had just enough plastic pots left over from prior plant purchases to house the transplants. In every case, when I removed the seedlings from their starter pony pack, the dirt they were growing in crumbled apart because the seedlings hadn't had enough time yet to form a root ball. This turned out to be a good thing, because I had to gently separate the roots of the two (and sometimes three) seedlings in each compartment of the pony pack. They came free easily and no roots were broken, as far as I could tell. Had they grown together for enough time to form a joint root ball, they wouldn't have been as easy to separate.

Before the transplanting, they'd spent three or four hours outside in the sunshine, and weren't displaying anywhere near the shock they'd shown the day before when they went outside for the first time. Today, since they were already outside and I had the dirt and new pots available, I went ahead and transplanted them. Then I brought them inside. Before long, some of them had started to droop, but I watered them gently and turned the sunlight gooseneck lamp on them, and by nightfall, most of the droopers had already righted themselves. Two of them, I didn't even transplant out of the pony pack at all--both because I had no more pots and because they were each in their compartment alone in the first place. They were also smaller than the others--neither has its second set of leaves yet. In order to have the right number for the spots in my garden, I need a total of six healthy Amish Paste tomato plants. That leaves space for two Burbank and two Principe Borghese.

One tomato plant can easily cost from $1.79 to $3.49, depending on size and rarity. So the total savings for me to grow my own from seed is negligible. I'm doing it more for the experience, and for the fact that not all varieties of heirloom tomatoes are available from the greenhouse or other local nurseries. This way, I can grow the varieties I want, and I don't have to be limited to anyone else's whim. Also, it's fascinating--being involved in the process from the very beginning to the end when I harvest the tomatoes. This'll be the first tomato-growing year where I haven't grown Roma, and although it's proven to be a prolific producer in the past, I wanted to go with Amish Paste this time--so we'll see.