By mid-June - ideal planting time in this part of the world - garden centres are discounting surplus stock or donating it to school fundraisers, because their tomato-growing customers have been trained to buy plants early. They do this because they want people to buy twice - first in early May and then, after those plants have died, again in late May/early June. Garden centres begin selling tomato plants in early May, six weeks before ideal planting time. Small seedlings planted into warm soil root in quickly and soon catch up to, and even surpass, earlier, larger transplants.They may go into shock and then need a couple of weeks to recover. If the soil is cool, the seedlings will sit and wait for it to warm up. There is no advantage to planting tomatoes into the garden early.If thirty or forty seedlings must be moved outdoors and back indoors every day, transferring them is much easier if they are small plants in small pots. Tomato seedlings need to be hardened off - gradually exposed to direct sunlight.They soon need to be repotted, and then repotted again, taking up more and more of our limited window space. I start tomatoes as late as possible for a few reasons. (Sure enough they did, and I threw them out today.) I wonder, if I had dried them instead of wet-packing them, would they have germinated again? An experiment for another time. ![]() ![]() I won’t be sowing tomatoes for another two weeks, but some seeds I was cleaning started germinating, sending out a rootlet, so I refrigerated them in damp paper for a few weeks and then potted several, knowing they would eventually start to rot in the fridge.
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