Apr. 27, 2008

Tomatosphere 'Space Tomatoes' ~ Day 53 Final Transplant

I haven't given you an update on our Tomatosphere tomato plants for quite some time! Actually they have just been growing peacefully on the dining room table since then but yesterday we decided that it was definitely time to transplant them again. Some of them were over a foot tall and starting to outgrow their pots :)


We gathered the largest pots we had which are the 1 gallon size and brought them in to be sterilized in the bleach and water bath like we did the first time and lugged in our super sized bag of potting soil! It's a good idea to give your tomato transplants a good drink of water a couple of hours before you start to transplant them so that you don't cause them extra stress by disturbing them when you pull their roots out of the pots.


Now that we had our pots washed and our potting soil scooped into a large bowl and moistened with tap water so that it was ready for the new pots we went out to get our tomato plants. Remember you can bury your tomato plant's stems with up to 75% of new dirt to encourage them to grow new roots all up the buried stem resulting in a stronger, healthier plant! In the above picture you can see that I pinched off all of the lower leaves or 'suckers' that would be going under the soil.


Here is our tomato plant ready for repotting after removing all of the lower suckers. Don't forget that you can only bury them as deep as your smallest tomato plant. So if you have 2 really tall tomato plants and a tiny one you can only place them in the dirt as deep as the little one can handle or you can forfeit the little one and remove it all together. We decided to keep all of ours, even the little guys *grin*


I was a little worried that our tomatoes might be a little root bound from being in the smaller pots for to long but when we pulled them out of their pots they had beautifully developed root systems that weren't bunched up to tightly. Phew!


Here they are all finished up. This will be the final time we repot them. In a couple of weeks we will start to put them outside during the day only, keeping them indoors overnight until the long weekend in May which will be May 20th. After that all danger of frost will be past and we can permanently put them outdoors :)

If you want to find out more about our space tomato project click HERE or to see what we have been up to with them you can check them out HERE.