About a month ago I made a post about setting up my hydroponics growing system and planting tomatoe seeds in it.
This post is a progress report about my tomatoe plants. The seeds came up pretty quickly and have grown really well in the hydroponics system.
I planted the tomato seeds in my hydroponics system on April 13, so it took six days for the first plants to appear.
The first signs of growing tomatoes appeared on April 19th as you can see there were a couple seeds sprouting up:
Below I decided to provide a sequence of images documenting the progress of tomatoes in the hydroponics growing system from the seed to the time I am transplanting young tomato plants into outdoor above ground growing containers.
The next day I saw seven or eight tomato plants appear:
Then two days later on April twenty second we have almost all twelve plants start to emerge:
By April twenty fifth we see that some plants are really starting to grow:
Just two days later and the plants are much larger!
By May 5th I had to raise the light a few times to make room for growing tomato plants.
And finally on May 6th it was the Tomato Transplanting day as my tomato plants ran out of room in the hydroponics growing system:
So I planted all of my plants outside in above ground containers as I have a really small yard and my experience growing tomatoes in the containers has been pretty good in the last few years:
When I transplant tomatoes I trim several leaves at the bottom and plant the plants lower than their original height. I am doing this as I read that when you bury part of the tomato vine it grows new roots which makes for a stronger plant.
I also added tomato specific fertilizer under every bush and watered the plants. I came back watering daily as we had a stretch of dry weather in the first days of May and these plants were used to hydroponic system which is basically roots in the water.
I did add three plants to my tomatoes that I acquired at my local Costco. Costco sells three plants together for a really good price. So I added Celebrity tomato, Early Girl tomato plant and Old German tomato plant. This way I have more varieties of tomatoes and and insurance if anything goes wrong with my plants that I still have three other tomato plants.
The image above was taken today, which is exactly two weeks after I have transplanted my tomato plants from the hydroponics growing system into the above the ground containers. The plants look about the same and I believe the reason for that is that:
It takes some time for the plants to adapt to the new container after transplanting
Our weather in Washington state is fairly cold this time of the year, especially at night. We still have 46 degrees Fahrenheit at night and tomatoes like it above 50 degrees.
Hopefully, once we hit June weather will become warmer and the tomato plants will really start growing. Washington state has a very short growing season and for that reason I try to get the earliest varieties of tomatoes.
In all prior years I would also assemble a small hot house outside, but this year since I was late planting my tomatoes due to my travel out of state, stuff going on at work and getting the house ready for the spring selling season I decided to skip that step, but it is possible that I should not have. We will see in a few months and I will post my updates here.
