Growing some early toms 2018

[Scarlet]

That’s quite a lot of tomato plants to have in your windowsill for the next 3months.

[Small pumpkin]

Little Bartholomew is growing

[Scoot]

That’s quite a lot of tomato plants to have in your windowsill for the next 3months.

I'll only be keeping about 5 of them. The rest will be getting binned or given away.

[ryanM]

Done some Gardeners Delight on the 6th of Feb and i have 3 plants doing well under grow light.



A little close up of one of them, i am amazed i got this little thing from a tiny seed. I did not think this would work out too well when i first started but how i was wrong...

[jackarmy]

Phots of my 20th of jan sown toms enjoying time up the gh.
From the left we have three balcony red and a Redskin pepper.
next three Rambling red stripe and three tumbling tom with half a pot of phlox .
Oh and two cherry falls on the end, they of course come indoors around 5pm.

[Small pumpkin]

Little Bartholomew isn't little anymore. He's in a 1lt pot at the moment.

[WalterWhite]

Outgrown your pot S.Pumpkin.... Looks very healthy though.

[jackarmy]

Old Barts looking mighty fine there SP, looks nicer without the purple glow from the nuclear powerstation as well

[Small pumpkin]

Old Barts looking mighty fine there SP, looks nicer without the purple glow from the nuclear powerstation as well

Area 51 if you don't mind we went to the kitchen for a little photo shoot. He does look better without his purple glow

[It never rains..it pours]

May I ask the date of planting or date of emergence please ?

[Small pumpkin]

May I ask the date of planting or date of emergence please ?

I can't give a date for germination because he germinated inside a tomato. I found and potted him up on the 9th January.

[Ani]

These are my September sown Red Robins.
I've read somewhere that they:
1) Can be grown in 9cm or 12cm pots.
2) Will reach 25-30cm.
3) Can cope well with low light levels, possibly even with winter light levels.
Which sounds too good to be true but also perfect winter experiment

These are both from one seed. It got over 50cm in December and I cut the upper half and repotted it. The pots are 13cm.
They are on an almost south-facing windowsill, but even there the light level during winter was not good enough. It looked weak, leggy and sickly most of the winter (you can see light deprived lower leaves and sunburnt middle leaves on the bigger plant).
The bigger plant is now around 70cm, the smaller one just under 30cm.
The smaller plant grows nicely, it's well-branched and doesn't have the tendency to grow up.
They both have a lot of buds now and starting flowering (some buds on the bigger opened yesterday).



Conclusion: Sowing in September with hope for December/January tomatoes doesn't work. Sowing in December or early January could work. I think that the problem with autumn sown plants is that the light level gets lower every day which can be confusing and growing after winter solstice would be more natural for them.
If they don't have enough light, they will grow much over 30 cm.

[hop-a-long]

Good work on the over wintered plants, I'm sure you'll get a pretty early crop anyway, and you can also get some decent cuttings or sideshoots from them now to give you plenty of plants for this summer! Do you have any artificial lights or just relying on natural sunlight? I think there's probably techniques using lights to trick your plants into flowering and fruiting using specific day lengths if you wanted to get scientific on it, but it's fun just to see how they cope with your own conditions.
I nursed a tomato plant (sunchocola) through the winter last year, it was a fully grown plant that I took pity on and hauled into the house in October, but the big downfall of it was that it acted as an ideal overwintering home for whiteflies too! I ended up with a bit of an infestation in the glasshouse later on from that- a problem I hadn't encountered before.
Just a heads up anyway!

[Penellype]

This is how mine are looking this morning.

On the sitting room windowsill:



4 Shirley plants, 3 big ones from last summer, which were cut down when they finished fruiting and sprouted again from the bottom. These all have at least 1 small fruit, just about ready to eat (I ate one yesterday). The empty pots are also from last year's tomatoes - I've left the pots there for now as the capillary matting is very smelly if you take the pots away! The smaller plant was a sideshoot from one of last year's plants, planted on 24th October and grown under lights until it was too tall. It has 3 trusses of flowers, but most have not set fruit and at the moment there are only 4 green tomatoes. There is a radiator under the window and I think that is why a lot of the bottom leaves look unhappy.

Under lights in the spare room:



There are 2 Shirley plants sown on 13th January in 3 litre pots. These were looking unhappy (you can see that the bottom leaves are shrivelled in places) but look much better now they have been potted on. The small ones in the black pots are Balconi yellow sown on 6th February. The other pot is Balconi red - I sowed 2 pots of these on the same day as the yellow (packets bought on same day 3 years ago and were fine last year), but nothing happened, so I sowed 2 more seeds on 22nd February. This plant germinated on 5th March, nothing is showing in the other pot so I put a couple more seeds in there yesterday. I have no idea why these have behaved so differently.
The other plants are carrots (Nantes Frubund) sown at the end of January, pea shoots (Onward) and french bean Sonesta sown in December, which is looking a bit yellow (they are yellow beans) but is starting to produce small pods.

[monkeyboy]

I sowed 2x Gardener's delight, 2x garden pearl and 2x moneymaker a week ago. The gardener's delight has already germinated. No idea what's happened to the others.