You can certainly use whatever you’d like, but for best results, choose a sterile seed starting mix. I have seen people use all kinds of soil for seed starting. Once you decide what kind of tomatoes you want to grow, you’ll have to buy seeds! You can get seeds from a host of places including your local nursery, garden centers, or online retailers. Young seedlings need to learn how to cope with outdoor conditions, and a light breeze from a fan does the job well. Fans are a great addition to your indoor seed starting system. Outside of seed starting, I use my heating mats to help with bread dough rising. Heating mats are 100% optional, but they make germination an absolute breeze. Seedlings can need 12-16 hours of light a day, so this is an important step. If you don’t have or don’t want to add grow lights to your system, you’ll need a very well-lit window or outdoor greenhouse. You have a one-time upfront purchase, but they can be used for many years to come. Grow lights make seed starting incredibly easy. If you grow more than a few plants, you’ll need a way to keep track of them! You can use something as simple as popsicle sticks to make colorful plastic markers that you can reuse each season. There are a number of options for this, but you’ll want something that is made of flexible material to make later transplanting easier. Once your seedlings have begun to grow, you’ll want to move them into a pot with more soil to encourage continued root system growth. This can range from plastic trays designed for this purpose, biodegradable pots, or homemade versions. We’ll get into this in more detail below, but you will need some kind of seed starter tray for your seeds. You’ll save yourself a lot of cleanup time, and there are very few things more annoying than trying to remove caked dirt from under your nails (male or female). But I strongly recommend them especially for extended time with your hands in the dirt. I like one that has a sharp point to it (we have lots of rocks in clay soil where I live), but any kind will do the job. You will need a gardening trowel for filling small pots with soil and transplanting your seedlings outside when they’re ready. Let’s take a look at everything you need – from the must haves to the nice-to-haves – to grow your tomatoes from seed this year. Growing tomatoes from seed is an incredibly fun and fairly easy process. What You’ll Need: Equipment List Make sure you have the materials and tools you need before you begin. Be sure to read reviews, and see how other gardeners have fared with the varieties you’re interested in. As I previously mentioned, my garden focuses on Romas (determinate), cherries (indeterminate), and a selection of heirlooms.īurpee, Baker, and TomatoFest are great places to start looking at seeds, but there are a lot of options out there. The bottom line is that you should take a moment at the beginning to decide what you really want to grow. You can find indeterminate or determinate varieties of each of those, and opt for fruits that range in colors from red, green, yellow, orange, purple, to striped! They contain a huge selection of tomato varieties including cherry, grape, plum, cocktail, beefsteak, paste, and heirlooms. Seed catalogs really opened up the world of seed starting. You can grow beefsteak varieties for slicing and sandwiches, saucing varieties like Romas and San Marzanos, or sweet cherry tomatoes that you pop off the vine right into your mouth! And with the prevalence of online seed retailers, the sky really is the limit. Picking The Right Tomato Type Choose the varieties that you grow based on how you most enjoy your tomatoes.Ĭhoosing the right tomato variety is all about identifying how you like to eat them. 3.5 Step 5 – Germination, Thinning and Transplanting.3.4 Step 4 – Daily Care of Your Seedlings.Instead, you can dream of exactly the type of tomato you want to eat, find seeds, and grow! No longer are you at the whim of your local garden center. And a whole new world will open up to you once you decide to grow tomatoes from seed. I love eating thick slices with a little salt and pepper and an accompaniment of fresh mozzarella. ![]() The colors, shapes, and flavors of those just can’t be beat. And every year, even though I don’t think I have the room, I always find an extra pot or two for heirloom varieties. I always have at least 1-2 sprawling cherry tomato plants because I love that sweet, bursting bite in salads, on toast, and in eggs. I can somehow never seem to grow enough tomatoes – beefsteak, saucing, cherry, heirlooms – I want them all! Romas are my tried and true variety for making pasta sauce (I make and freeze enough in the summer to last a good chunk of the winter months), but I’ve also had great success with San Marzanos. ![]() Growing tomatoes is a must in my garden each year.
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