I'm trying hard to hang onto the smallest of the tomato seedlings. We've been having such cold weather so far this spring that it's been hard to take them outside into the sunshine. And lately a new problem has cropped up (no pun intended.) The tomato plants in the 3-inch plastic containers seem to be doing fine. They keep growing, their leaves are green, and they're looking pretty good despite the fact that they no doubt need more natural sunlight. But the ones I transplanted into the 3-inch peat pots don't look as healthy as they should. For the most part, their newest leaves are still a nice deep green, but some of the older, larger leaves have turned yellow, and they just aren't growing much at all. The flats of tomatoes live right next to each other, in the same window. My only guess as to what's wrong is that the tomatoes in the peat pots were staying too dry. The plastic pots don't "breathe" or allow for air passage through the sides, so they retain water longer and the soil doesn't dry out as easily. But the ones in the peat pots had perpetually dry soil in the bottoms of the pots though I'd given them the same amount of water as the others. When I tried to take care of the dry soil problem, I had to add some serious water in order to get the peat pots to turn damp on the sides. Over the last two to three days with the extra water, some of those yellow leaves seem to be getting darker--perhaps on their way back to green, or so I hope. I'm taking note of this for next year--it seems much trickier to keep the right moisture balance in the soil of plants growing in peat pots as opposed to plastic. I may have to switch to only plastic pots in the future, unless I figure out just how much water the plants in the peat pots will need to stay green and healthy until transplant. It also occurs to me that the peat pots might present a problem with temperature regulation--the plastic pots would tend to keep the plants' roots warmer. In the summer, they'd hate that, but in a cold spring, it could be actually helping them. I need more observation on this....
I hope I don't lose any of them. All four of the Burbank red slicing tomatoes are in peat pots. I'd hate to lose them, and I'd hate to lose any of the others I was saving for trade.
On a more encouraging note, the chives growing in the large container outside are doing quite well, and so far have needed very little water due to plenty of rain this spring. If we are to obtain as many local foods as possible, (which of course includes herbs and spices) we'll have to preserve as much of the home-grown items as possible over the course of the spring and summer. To that end, I harvested some chive stems tonight, cut them to the standard size, sprinkled them onto one of the new fruit leather trays (which has no holes for them to fall through) and put them in the dehydrator. I'll have to do this fairly often throughout the season in order to harvest enough to last all year. They smelled so good when I cut them that it was tempting to just microwave a potato and use all those chives immediately...but I behaved myself. There should still be plenty of time for fresh-cut chives on potatoes later.
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