True Love and TOMATOES

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Starting Tomatoes

To outdo the neighbors with the first tomatoes of the season, you can start seed a good eight to ten weeks or more before the last frost in your locale. You'll need half-bushel containers for each plant, HID gro-lites, and patience to jiggle the little yellow flowers every morning before 10 a.m. to self-pollinate for the earliest fruit.

In competition with hunger rather than the neighbors when we began homesteading back in the '60s, my wife and I started tomatoes the same way my grandfather had on his Indiana home place. Six weeks before last frost, he saved seed from favorite open-pollinated (nonhybrid) varieties, but always ordered new seed of the best-sounding varieties from catalogs or packets from the Farm Co-op or some store display. In late winter, he would begin indoor planting. Starting soil was mixed from equal parts rich poultry-litter compost, vermiculite and peat moss, with a scattering of ground limestone to sweeten it. It was ovenbaked at 300°F, till an average-sized potato in the middle of the mix was cooked through. This was to sterilize soil to prevent "damping off," when soil- or airborne fungus girdles young seedlings at damp-soil level. The mix was packed into egg cartons, the seed planted 1/4" deep, and the egg-carton starting trays put in shallow metal baking pans. The pans were set on a flat board wound with soil-heating cable that warmed the soil to encourage rapid germination. In the tin trays, we watered plants from the bottom until seed sprouted about a week and a half later.

Today I use purchased sterile, chicken litter-based starting medium and Canadian peat pots rather than home mix and egg cartons - though you can still mix and sterilize your own. And you can save even more cash by getting (from most mail-order seed houses) a little machine that presses plant-growing containers from wet newspaper (use an awl to punch a few holes though the sides of each cup to allow young roots to penetrate easily).

Some gardeners maintain a layer of bone-dry mineral soil supplement (perlite or vermiculite) around stems as they grow. Lacking a moist growing medium at soil level, stems will not become infected with damping-off fungus.

Place the started seeds in open, moving air by a sunny window or under fluorescent lamps until seedlings have at least two pair of jagged, true leaves above the first rounded, cotyledonous leaves. Then transplant the most robust plants (paper or egg-carton cup and all) into coffee cans with hole-punched bottoms or to large-size peat pots of mix. Then transfer to a gro-lamp or outdoors to a glass window-topped cold frame. Built up against the ever-warm kitchen wall, the plants will "harden off' and get used to normal outdoor temperature/sun cycles.

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