Mar. 27, 2008

Tomatosphere 'Space Tomatoes' ~ Day 22 Transplanting

I haven't updated you on how our space tomatoes are doing for quite a while so I thought that I would share with you what we did with them today :) As you can see above they are doing really well but have outgrown their little peat pots we started them in so we transplanted them into larger pots today.


To start with we washed our pots in hot soapy water with a splash of bleach to kill off any mold, bugs or fungi that might be growing in them since we were using recycled pots. You can use any sort of container as a plant pot, such as yogurt containers, margarine tubs, cottage cheese or sour cream containers and so on as long as it's big enough to provide larger space than your previous container provided. If you want to use real pots you can almost always find used ones at garage sales or thrift stores for super cheap.


After our pots were all cleaned we filled them about 1/4 full with moistened potting soil....


and then placed one of the peat pots of tomato seedlings into the pot.


Very gently we then placed the soil up and around the stems of the tomato plants burying them deeply in the soil. You can cover their stems with dirt up to 75% and this will encourage them to grow new roots all up the buried stem creating an enhanced root system and a stronger plant.


All finished and ready to be placed in front of the window again. We made sure to label them A or B so that we didn't confuse the different groups. So far both groups are still progressing the same, although we have 2 more plants in group B than we do in group A. Whether or not that means anything we will see :)