Tag: potting up

Mixing and repotting

19 Apr 20222 May 2009 by Mike (tfb)

Today’s featured task: potting up tomatoes from plug sheets to 3″ peat pots. As with many things here this season, this is a little later than usual, by a week or so, as the new farm set-up gets squared away. (It should all even out sometime in June.)

This batch of seedling mix is about 50% compost, 25% peat and 25% perlite. Lynn and Andie did the blending on top of a stack of 4×8 plywood, using a shovel, and hand-crumbling clumps of peat and compost. With a little experience, it’s easy to judge a mix by squeezing it (or you can just follow a recipe exactly), but a fairly foolproof test, when using compost or soil, is to water-in a loosely packed pot: if the mix collapses into a muddy muck, you need (lots) more perlite/vermiculite/peat. Water should flow through leaving things still kinda fluffy.

Between tomatoes, peppers and eggplant, we’ll end up with maybe 900 potted-up transplants, aimed for the field in about three weeks. I’d decided to stop using peat pots this year because you have to keep buying them (they’re planted with the seedling). BUT: it’s so busy, there was no time for soil blocks, hadn’t had a chance to find a supplier for reasonably priced, small bulk quantity (reusable!) plastic pots, and we found an inexpensive peat pot supplier in town (they’re usually ordered and delivered), so it’s peat once again this year…

Seedlings on the move

15 Apr 200912 Apr 2009 by Mike (tfb)

Seedlings seem to expand in spurts, like these Vittoria eggplant, growing quietly for two weeks or so since they first appeared, then suddenly reaching out to touch their neighbors practically overnight. Even the tomatoes, a week old in 200-cell trays, will soon be getting crowded. In just a few more days…

I haven’t yet stumbled upon or otherwise discovered the absolutely best time to transplant up. Generally, I try to move plants to bigger containers before their leaves start to overlap and steal each other’s light. But in practice, since potting up means the same number of seedlings take way more space, the timing ends up being determined by how much room there is under the lights.

The first plants started, in late winter-early spring, tend to also be quite cold-hardy—onions, the brassicas, various herbs—so they can usually be moved out to the unheated/barely heated greenhouse in March and April, making room under the lights for the next wave of seedlings. This year, until the greenhouse is set up, as the seedlings expand, there’s nowhere for them to go. Gotta get that greenhouse up!

Potting up

28 Apr 200825 Apr 2008 by Mike (tfb)

Many things are going on at once, and one of them is potting up seedlings and moving them out to the greenhouse. Already, onions, leek, parsley, lettuce, and the first trays of cauliflower and broccoli are out there, all of them hardy enough to take whatever cold comes along. What’s really going to use up space once they’re potted up are the tender tomatoes, peppers and eggplant. I’d like to’ve had them all done by now, BUT, there’s going to be a cold snap for 4-5 days starting early next week, a couple of nights may go down as low as -8°C (18°F), and I’m concerned that row cover and the kerosene heater may not be enough protection in the unheated greenhouse. So I’m waiting, potting up a few every day and finding room for them under the lights. I started with the Chosen 100, my earliest 100 tomato starts, 25 each of Big Beef (above), Juliet, Striped German and Stupice (in order, two hybrids and two open pollinated heirlooms). They’ve gone into 3″ peat pots, with a mix of peat, compost and soil, and I’m also hardening them off outside. The rest of the toms were started a couple of weeks later. They’ll move from 72- to 38-cell trays, all part of the spend-less-time-on-transplants experiments… Waiting on weather forecasts is a bit of a risky way to work, it’s really not a good idea to delay anything at this point in the year, I’ve found it’s generally better to get on with things and deal with problems as they come up, not try to second guess the future. But I have so much else to do, I’ll take the chance and wait a couple more days to finish them all…