I’m new to this and I just recently got a saladette tomato plant (biggest one pictured with cage) and I also started a few peppers and a tomato myself from seeds any and all advice would be greatly appreciated, thank you! (The one in the brown pot that is sprouting is the tomato that I started from seeds. )
How fun! Tomato seedling is cute!😊 Tomatoes can grow roots all the way up their stems so they like being buried deep to have big healthy root systems. Not the seeds, but the plants. So for example, I usually start my seed in a small pot (2 inch-ish) and then transplant when the roots are coming out of the bottom. Then I cut off the lower leaves and plant the plant in a pot double the size, and put dirt halfway up the stem. I continue doing this until they are in a 6 inch-ish pot, and then I move them to their big pot filled halfway with dirt. I then cut off the lower leaves and fill the dirt up higher as it gets bigger. I keep doing this until the dirt is up to almost the top of the pot. So you could scoop up that seedling with a handful of dirt when it’s bigger, and burry it deeper in the center of that pot to help it grow more roots. I have been growing cherry and grape tomatoes for 15 years so I know it helps them produce more, but my understanding is that it helps all kinds of tomatoes. It will also grow just fine if you don’t want to do any of that.🤪 Just might not produce as much.
2 Me gusta Tomatoes are also heavy feeders, so make sure you fertilize them a few times during the summer. I am in zone 8a in Texas so mine grow through December. How long your summer is will affect how much food they need.
1 me gustaThank you!!
1 me gustaOvernight the sprout it already taller and there’s 2 more , one directly next to it and 1 on the other side of the pot towards the bottom of the picture
This is exactly what they are
Cute! Sprouts are so fun! Tomato plants get big so when they are maybe 4-6 inches, you can transplant them to their own pots to grow and do the deeper, deeper trick I mentioned before.😊
1 me gusta Peppers like a little less water than tomatoes. One trick I use is to put marigolds in the pepper pot to absorb more water. I like to put my pepper starts right in their final big pot and they can struggle with using all the water that amount of dirt can hold. So I put a marigold plant or two in there with them until they are big enough to take over the pot. Then I pull out the marigolds and stick them in a pot elsewhere. Marigolds are hardy and can handle being pulled out several times a season. They drink a lot of water so they are great for this purpose. The pepper plant will bush out more if you pinch off the top section of leaves. It should give you a more stable plant and more peppers. I have grown green bell peppers and gypsy peppers so this advice may or may not directly translate to other kinds of peppers. I ended up pulling out the green peppers because I kept picking them unripe and only grow gypsy peppers now.😄
1 me gusta
That’s amazing!
2 Me gusta I was just looking for this post to add this picture.😄 Here’s one of my pepper plants after I pinched off the top less than a week ago. They start branching out quickly! All the small leaves are from the last few days.
Oh, and I just sprinkle marigold seeds in a random pot and they grow easy. I then scoop them up when I need to add them to a garden pot. I sprinkled them in this pot without covering them or anything the day before we got really bad hail. They didn’t care and are growing great a month later.😄
