help with identifying tomato seedlings please

[mucklover]

help please!
i planted some moneymaker and tumbling tom tomato seeds a couple of weeks ago, labelled them up carefully and then when my back was turned my darling 3-year-old daughter decided to 'help' with the gardening and took all my labels out! i now have a whole load of seedlings but dont know which is which. They seem to have either purplish stems or more white stems - does anyone know which would be which?

[wellie]

I'm not blessed with kiddy-winkies myself, so I'm straight away here to applaud your child for taking an active interest in gardening?! but don't panic, because generally if you give the seedlings a while to develop a little they will all start to grow 'differently' and then you'll be able to identify by their 'growth habit' just exactly which are the uprighty ones and which are the tumbly ones.

Every year I promise myself that I'm NOT going to get the tommy varieties muggled up this year, and every single year..... I just do, so how bad am I?!
(If you're going to be growing the same varieties each year, and roughly the same quantities of each.... you might consider writing with a permanent marker onto each plastic flowerpot the name of the variety? and then you can wash and re-use those pots annually accordingly and don't need to bother with labels, says she, who's cocked it up herself yet again this year....) But then again - I counted my potted-up Tommies, not quite believing what I spouted off to a neighbour the other day, only to find that I was indeed correct, because I HAVE got a hundred homegrown tommie seedlings.

[Lotsaveg]

help please!
i planted some moneymaker and tumbling tom tomato seeds a couple of weeks ago, labelled them up carefully and then when my back was turned my darling 3-year-old daughter decided to 'help' with the gardening and took all my labels out! i now have a whole load of seedlings but dont know which is which. They seem to have either purplish stems or more white stems - does anyone know which would be which?

Coincidently I'm growing both those varieties as well! I'll check later today when I visit the greenhouse and let you know

[Lotsaveg]

My Moneymaker seedlings have purple stems and the tumblers appear to have green stems although they've only just started to germinate. Hope that helps!

I'm also growing an amazing variety called Balconi Red. It's a small variety that produces loads of delicious fruit from May through to November in the greenhouse. I then still have lots of green tomatoes to make a chutney for christmas!

[Florence Fennel]

I think we've all had some kind of mishap with labelling! I'm not growing these varieties so can't help, but I can wish you luck in identifying them eventually!

[mucklover]

thanks everyone - will label them up again (purple= moneymaker, green = tumbling), but this time will permanent marker the pots!

then hopefully in a few weeks i'll be able to tell whether we got it right!

[mucklover]

well the purple stem idea didnt really work, cos they all turned a bit purplish in the end... however, after a few weeks it was really obvious which was which from the way they were growing - moneymaker is very strongly upright, whereas the tumbling tom was much more spidery and curled over.
so all are now identified, and i'll be planting them out in the right places very soon...