We’re getting ready for tomato season on our patio. I know it’s a bit late and they seem a bit small, but I had to restart the season after wind knocked my tomato seedlings that i planted earlier in the spring. We were devastated. This year also proved to be a bit strange when it comes to weather. We had frost in May this year. So i couldn’t even plant anything outside till this week. And when you’re planting tometoes in containers it’s important to keep track of time. This is how these boys look now:

Now that they are out of the seeding container they will quickly grow to the size when they can go in containers. From the last year experiment with growing tomatoes in containers we learned these things:

1. Mind the time – make sure everything gets done in time. Don’t try to rush ahead by planting them too soon, and don’t fall behind by leaving them in seeding containers too long. Replant them as soon as they develop their first real leaf (they should look like on the pic).
2. Mind the weather – make sure you don’t take them outside too soon. Also make sure to aclimate them by first either taking them outside during the day or keeping them in a greenhouse that you open during the day and close in the night if the temperatures are about to drop below 16 Celsius.
3. Plant them deep – tomatoes have roots that don’t travel deep in the ground. So when doing the first replanting (like on the pic) make sure you put the roots deeper then their seeding level. I replanted mine as deep as I could, but since they are a bit long the yoghurt glasses proved to be a bit too short. You can plant them up to their leaves, so they develop the roots deeper. Also when watering them make sure to water them from the container’s plate, as well as from the top, so you force them to develop their roots deeper. Otherwise they get dry pretty soon, and fall from the containers.
4. Make sure they are watered well – tomatoes like to drink. A LOT. So during the drought wather them twice – once in the morning and then again in the evening.
5. They NEED 8 hours of sunshine – you won’t have a harvest until you provide them with enough sunshine. We were having some work done on our sunny patio so our tometoes were kept in lower part of garden and received around 5 hrs of sunshine. That was not enough. They did bloom, but there wasn’t much flowers AND there were NO fruits. After we transfered them to the sunny patio we had our first harvest within a week. So sunshine is IMPORANT.
6. Mind the fertilizer – Make sure to fertilize them, because they are hungry eaters. The last year we didn’t fertilize them and didn’t have a long harvest. Also those beef varieties gave us only one harvest, while cherry tomatoes gave us several harvests. So this year i’ll plant them inside the extra fertile soil and then fertilize them every two weeks. We’ll see how it goes.

This is it for now, the spring part of tomatoes is done. We’ll be replanting them to their big containers in two weeks and then wait for the first tomatoes to ripen 😛 . Can’t wait for the first tomato harvest. Yummy!