Sunday, April 16, 2006

Re-potting Tomatoes

The poor tomatoes were getting very tall and lanky to the point that they are falling over. So I decided to re-pot them a little deeper. I had read that you are suppose to transplant them deeper to the point where you almost cover the bottom set of leaves with soil. This is suppose to allow them to have deeper roots and stronger stock. Well, I think I let these get a little too tall.

When I dug one out I found that it didn't have much of a root. It was jut barely hanging on to the soil so I dug it out and buried it deeper. Many of them I had to gently bend the stem to get them to go in lower. Unfortunately I broke a couple. I went ahead and planted the broken ones anyway to see if they would take root again. I'm not holding my breath though. (Note for next year: Plant seeds in small, shallow containers and move up to bigger, deeper ones..)

I transplanted half of them to new pots since I had originally planted two per pot. Now is just one plant per pot. I didn't have another deep root seed starting container so I devised some by cutting the bottoms off of the seedling containers you can buy at the nursery. I got some more craft felt and got it dripping wet and placed the cut containers on top of it to act as a self waterer. I'll keep my fingers crossed!

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