My report concerning my tomato plats is mixed. I have good news and bad news.
Since you should always take the bad news first, here goes...
My early tomato seedlings have Damping Off Disease!
I knew they were in trouble even when I transplanted them to the newspaper pots. Even in that post, I reported that I had waited way too long before transplanting. Remember, the roots were six inches long out the bottom of the cell pack! I had over watered them and caused them to be weak overall.
To make matters worse, I'm not yet familiar with how the newspaper pots should look so I think I continued to over water - an open invitation for Damping Off. Total failure. I will NOT be the first on the block to have a red ripe tomato this year. So I'll have to invoke some familiar sports sentiments like "maybe next year", "better luck next time" and "you win some, you lose some"... (Long Sigh).
Now for the good news (he says to make himself feel better), The other main season seedlings are doing great. Remember, since I didn't buy all of the new varieties that I wanted, I planted EVERY variety of old seed I had - 45 varieties! Some seeds were as much as five years old. Well, remarkably all varieties but Principe Borghese germinated at least one plant for me!
So now I will have way more tomato plants than I can plant.
For the older seed varieties, I planted three or four seeds per cell, so I had to thin them pretty early on.
Growing plants this way, you select the strongest looking seedling and remove the rest so as to give the best seedling more root space. If you plant seeds in this way, never pull out the plants that you don't want. Always cut the unwanted plants away at the soil line. Otherwise you will disturb the roots of your good plant.
SOON, I will transplant these to larger pots. I will be watching daily, looking for the first set of true leaves, and then I will pot them up to three or four inch pots. I have to baby these plants because they represent my entire tomato production for 2011.
Remember to check out other bloggers tomato posts on this week's Tomato Tuesday. I will add this post to it even though I'd rather not show more people my early tomato failure (think about the good news tomatoes instead, Marc). Yes, I will have to stay positive.
Happy Tomato Tuesday!
I really like working with paper pots. Here's what I do with them to make sure they are getting the right amount of water. I touch the side of the paper pot at the top. If it is damp I don't water. If it is dry, I put water in a container and put the paper pots with the tomatoes in it. I leave them in water for about an hour. The very top of the seed starter stays dry while the roots get watered. So far, no damping off. That's not to say that it won't happen in the future. Who knows, I might just be lucky this time.
Posted by: Bill Brikiatis | April 21, 2011 at 01:00 PM