Heirloom Tomatoes

Growing Tomatoes from seed for the first time has been a challenging, but valuable experience! As mentioned in our introductory post, we planted five varieties of Heirloom tomatoes; Yellow Pear, Green Zebra, Purple Calabash, Purple Cherokee, and Red Zapotec.

On April 13, we prepared 4 jiffy pots for each kind, which amounted to 20 jiffy pots in total, and we filled each pot with a moist soiless mix. We don't have plant lights, so we didn't use any; just natural sunlight from a south-facing window.

Due to the fact we planted 2 to 4 tomato seeds per pot, we had several plants sprouting in each. Rather than killing off the other sprouts so that there would be 1 tomato per pot, which is recommended, we decided to carefully separate the seedlings and pot them each in a pot of their own. We decided to use large red plastic beer cups because we needed something larger than jiffy pots, but regular pots would have been too expensive.

Approximately two weeks later, we lost quite a few of them through the process of hardening them off.Being first time growers of tomatoes from seed, we were under the impression that hardening the tomatoes off simply meant getting the plants used to the breeze and the temperatures. We didn't realized that the UV Rays from the sun were really the largest concern due to the thin quality of the tomato leaves which make them easy to damage. After having our plants out in direct sunlight for approximately 3 hours, we noticed the leaves were almost white, and brought them indoors. Some internet searching led us to the answer of sunburn and a detailed explanation of how to harden tomatoes off properly. We decided to leave our plants indoors anyway to help them recover. About 8 of the 30 pots (20 pots originally, plus 10 gained through re-potting)have survived. Three of these are Green Zebra, three are Yellow Pear, and two are Purple Cherokee. They are each approximately two to three inches high, so we're going to wait another week or two, with hope that they will get bigger, before planting them outdoors.

At least we have learned a lot this year, so maybe we'll have more success next year when we plant again.

Jennifer