Garden Basics with Farmer Fred

Tips for beginning and experienced gardeners. New episodes arrive every Friday. Fred Hoffman has been a U.C. Certified Master Gardener since 1982 and writes a weekly garden column for the Lodi News-Sentinel in Lodi, CA. A four-decade fixture in Sacramento radio, he hosted three radio shows for Northern California gardeners and farmers: The KFBK Garden Show, Get Growing with Farmer Fred, and the KSTE Farm Hour. Episode Website: https://gardenbasics.net

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Garden Basics with Farmer Fred

311 Tomato Seed Starting Tips

February 23, 2024 • Fred Hoffman • Season 5 • Episode 13

Last Week, we gave you tips for starting your pepper plants from seed. Today, we have tips for starting your summertime tomatoes from seed. And now’s the time to begin, Again, we get a little help from America’s Favorite Retired College Horticulture Professor, Debbie Flower.

She has ingenious ways of determining if your old tomato seeds are still any good. She has advice on which media is best for starting tomato seeds. And, the importance of cleaning your pots thoroughly, before planting tomato seeds. And if that wasn’t enough, Debbie talks about the importance of light and wind for those young tomato seedlings.

It’s all in Episode 311 of Garden Basics - Tomato Seed Starting Tips.

We’re podcasting from Barking Dog Studios here in the beautiful Abutilon Jungle in Suburban Purgatory, it’s the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast, brought to you today by Smart Pots and Dave Wilson Nursery. Let’s go!

Previous episodes, show notes, links, product information, and transcripts at the home site for Garden Basics with Farmer Fred, GardenBasics.net. Transcripts and episode chapters also available at Buzzsprout.

Pictured: Tomato Seedlings

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Dave Wilson Nursery https://www.davewilson.com/home-garden/
Burpee Tomato Seeds
Heirloom Tomato Seed Collection
Totally Tomatoes Catalog
Tomato Growers Supply Co
Tomato Fest
Lighting Systems, Propagation Mats for Seedlings
Call House and Garden at Fort Ross

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Ep. 311 Tomato Seed Starting Tips TRANSCRIPT

Farmer Fred

Garden Basics with Farmer Fred is brought to you by Smart Pots, the original lightweight, long lasting fabric plant container. It's made in the USA. Visit SmartPots.com/fred for more information and a special discount. that's smartpots.com/fred. Welcome to the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast. If you're just a beginning gardener or you want good gardening information, you've come to the right spot.

Farmer Fred

It’s all in Episode 311 of Garden Basics - Tomato Seed Starting Tips.

TOMATO SEED STARTING TIPS, PT 1

Farmer Fred

Right now, you might be seriously thinking about starting some tomato seeds for your garden. Not a bad idea. You're going to find more tomato varieties on a seed rack or in a catalog than you're ever going to find in plant form at your local nursery. You’ll find tastier varieties, disease resistant varieties, just an amazing selection of tomatoes. If you've ever looked at a tomato catalog, like Totally Tomatoes, or the Tomato Growers Supply Company or Tomatofest, you know you can fill a catalog with nothing but tomato varieties. Well, that's dangerous for us gardeners when you get something like that. So how do you plant tomato seeds? How do you get them growing so that they'll take off when you put them in the ground? Well, first of all, Debbie flower is here, by the way. She grows at least one tomato plant a year.

Debbie Flower

I grow one. You grow a lot.

Farmer Fred

Just ask my wife: I grow too many. But being in suburban purgatory, I've really slashed the amount of tomato varieties I try, from 40 down to about 10. But still I have fun starting tomatoes. You get into a rhythm and you just love seeing the results. To me, spring is when you can rub your finger along a tomato stem of a young tomato plant and then smell your finger.

Debbie Flower

Savor that fragrance.

Farmer Fred

Yes, you get that tomato fragrance. That’s when you know that spring is here. And there's nothing like the taste of a tomato, straight from the garden.

Debbie Flower

They try and they can't duplicate it.

Farmer Fred

No, they can't. And even I must say though, here we are, recording this in late January, early February. And I still had tomatoes from last year's garden in the garage. Just taking their time, turning green to red. It took them a while. But that's okay. It's nice having a homegrown tomato in late January.

Debbie Flower

Yeah, from the garden.

Farmer Fred

Now obviously it doesn’t have the texture. It's not that juicy. And the taste isn't what it is when you pluck it off a vine on a summer evening. But still, you grew it. It’s a keeper variety to me now.

Debbie Flower

Some are advertised as good keepers.

Farmer Fred

There is one even called Long Keeper. And I've grown that, and it’s pretty tasteless.

Debbie Flower

Boy, it was it was a long, long time ago that I grew it. I was just pleased to have something to eat.

Farmer Fred

I think it depends on the thickness of the skin of the tomato, whether it can be a keeper like that or not. And actually take the time to turn from green to red. I think the key in picking those late season tomatoes that are green is make sure they've already started turning a little bit of color, so you see a little bit of color breaking.

Debbie Flower

That really pale, almost blue green they are more on the yellow side.

Farmer Fred

You put them in a single layer in a box or an egg carton, put it in a nice cool place and they're not touching each other.

Debbie Flower

They're not touching each other because they're still alive. They're still putting off a little bit of liquid and if they're touching each other, that's where you'll get rot.

Farmer Fred

So you keep them separated. And it might take months but so what? You guys still got a homegrown tomato and it's still better than a store bought tomato. yes it is. So that's why you grow tomatoes. But we have to plant them first. Okay, I picked out my seeds. By the way, we should talk about this. How long can you save tomato seeds? And where do you save them?

Debbie Flower

The rule of thumb is that the seeds will last two years if they are stored properly and properly means cool and dry. And so I store my seeds in the refrigerator. That's cool. And it's not a freezer.

Farmer Fred

So it's like 35 degrees?

Debbie Flower

More like 44 or 40.

Farmer Fred

So you keep moving the crisper?

Debbie Flower

No, I just keep them in a Ziploc bag on the shelf.

Farmer Fred

Okay. And nobody's thought of it as poppy seeds or anything, to put on a bread?

Debbie Flower

No, those are in my freezer.

Farmer Fred

All right, you don't have to go that far. But you can, if you have the room, I guess in your refrigerator is good, but also store them under your bed, that isn't a bad place. That's a cool dry place.

Debbie Flower

Right. It's controlled temperatures. It's not like your garage, which is going to be extremely cold in winter and extremely hot in summer. That would be brutal for seeds. And they would not last very long. Seeds are a living organism. There's a fully formed plant inside the seed and a bunch of food for that seed to live on. And so the seed is in sort of a suspended animation at that point, but it is alive. And in order for it to start to grow, it needs to remain alive. And so it's living off of that little bit of food that's in there.

Farmer Fred

Do you keep the original packet?

Debbie Flower

Absolutely.

Farmer Fred

Okay, but it's not with the seeds. You said you put it in plastic. or do you put the packet in plastic?

Debbie Flower

In a Ziploc bag.

Farmer Fred

All right.

Debbie Flower

Oh, yeah, there's lots of information on the packet. And then there's a picture. And so I usually paperclip it shut, some of them stick back down on the flap. If it doesn't, I roll them a couple of times, use a paper clip to shut it. I group them by season, things that I would start in late winter, early spring; things that I would start later in the season, things I would start in late summer for a fall crop, and edibles versus ornamentals. So when I'm ready, when the season comes on, when I'm going to start seeds, I can pull out a bunch that's rubber banded together and look through them and see what I have. And what I want to do.

Farmer Fred

Chances are, you probably have tomato packets that are more than two or three years old. But you can still test them to see if they're any good.

Debbie Flower

You can. Seed testing is a good thing to do. And it was a lab we always did in plant propagation class. And it's pretty easy. We used 10 seeds, because the math is easy if you use 10. And we used a paper towel. We fold the paper towel down the middle, either direction, whichever way, it doesn't matter which dimension you want to use. But the 10 seeds are separated from each other on the fold. Fold the paper towel over them. It helps if the paper towels a little damp at that point, and then roll it up like a cigar so that the folded side with the seeds is one end of the cigar. And then the paper towel definitely needs to be wet now. And then stand it up. I think we used a beaker because we were in a lab. But you can use a mug or something and then put the whole thing in a ziploc bag and zip it shut in a warm place. And if the seed packet will tell you that the seeds should germinate in seven to 10 days, we would then check it in seven days and count how many had germinated. The reason for standing the cigar up in the beaker or mug is that the roots will then grow down and it's easier to see which seed produced those roots. You can lay it on the counter, but when the roots start to grow, they go all over the place. And it's hard to tell how many seeds actually germinated with growing laying down.

Farmer Fred

Do the stronger seeds produce longer roots?

Debbie Flower

I don't know if that's proven or not. Stronger seeds tend to have more food. The bigger seeds tend to have more plant food in them and they tend to last longer. Sometimes they actually produce bigger plants, but I don't have any data about that.

Farmer Fred

Okay, you've done the paper towel test. And let's say you had 10 out of 10.

Debbie Flower

10 of 10 means I can take one seed and put it where I want one plant to grow and I should get 100% germination.

Farmer Fred

Well it's a tomato seed, so you're probably going to be putting it in a container indoors and in a seed starting mix.

Debbie Flower

Yes, more than likely, probably with a little piece of paper towel attached to it. So that's what the students always wanted to do is grow this now. And so then we had to cut around the seeds. They often stick to paper towels. I know you like to use coffee filters, which do not stick as much. The roots are very tender at this point. And if the plant has started to come out of the seed as well that's very easily snapped in pieces. It's full of water. So we would just cut around the germinated seed including some of the paper towel and plant the whole thing into a container.

Farmer Fred

It can figure its way out of that. And how deep would you plant it?

Debbie Flower

The depth to seed planting is related to the size of the seed, you want to cover a seed with an amount of soil that is equal to two to three times the narrowest part of the seed. Tomato seeds are maybe as thick as a piece of paper, maybe a little thicker than that.

Farmer Fred

Yeah, they're not very thick.

Debbie Flower

Let's say an eighth of an inch. In their narrowest dimension. We're not talking top to bottom on the round side, we're turning it on its side, it's laying flat on the table. And that's from the table up, is its narrowest dimension. And that's about an eighth of an inch. So I would cover them only with a maximum of about a quarter of an inch of media. And it would be moist media. I always moistened my media before I put it in the container. And before I put it on top of the plant. A reason for that is media can be difficult to wet. So if you fill your container first and then water it, it may not get wet all the way down. And if it doesn't, your roots won't grow there.

Farmer Fred

Well, that's one reason why, when I use a commercial seed starting mix, I will dump that bag into a bucket, fill it with water and let it sit overnight. And then drain it the next day by putting it all into a five gallon plant container where there's holes on the bottom and the water can drain out. But the soil mix stays in the bucket. It's wet, so I'm going to work with it that day. So I can get in there and grab a nice muddy mess. And bring it out, bit by bit, and throw it in a container and then put the seed down and then sprinkle on some more of that wet soil - the seed starting mix - on top. And that works.

Debbie Flower

I do it differently. I use kitty litter boxes, not the ones that kitty litter comes in. But the boxes that sit in the house where the cat uses the kitty litter the plastic box. I mix. I never use anything right out of the bag, I always add a little bit more of the rock component such as perlite, or vermiculite. It would be vermiculite in this case of seed starting because they're small and lightweight particles. That's what you want in a seed starting mix - small and lightweight particles. And then I'll add some water with the hose and use my hands. Maybe I just enjoy that mixing with my hands of the media to get it wet all the way through. Then I'll fill my containers, put the seed on top, put a little bit of more of the moist media and I always add a little bit of vermiculite on top. Vermiculite is expanded mica, I think of it like an accordion in that it's got layers like that with spaces between them. And it holds moisture really well. Because of those layers, how thin they are and how close together they are. A few big dangers in starting seed - one is that your seeds dry out, they dry out then they die, and it's all over. Another is that the temperature gets too extreme one way or another. But the vermiculite helps with the water problem.

Farmer Fred

You left out another cause of demise. The soil is too wet, right? Then you have what's called damping off, which is so sad because you get this nice little baby plant growing it might have a cotyledon or it might even have two true leaves. And then it just falls over.

Debbie Flower

Come over the next day and the whole flat of them just all laid down in the same direction. Yeah, damping off is a fungus that grows at the exact temperatures and humidity and moisture that seedlings germinate. And it eats young seedlings, that's the only thing it eats. If you've got your first true leaves, the stem of the plant is too thick for the damping off fungus to consume it. So it's right when they're first germinated, that it consumes them.

Farmer Fred

I would then start raising red flags around what sort of soil mix that I used. That happened and I'd probably switch whatever I was doing for a soil mix.

Debbie Flower

You want to make sure when you're starting seeds that your containers are immaculately clean, that you've washed them in the sink and there's no trace of any media leftover in them. And if I'm starting drought tolerant plants, which tend to be more sensitive, I have found damping off on things like tomatoes, I will actually make a 10% bleach solution. And I will put my containers, my washed containers, washed and rinsed, in that for about 10 minutes to disinfect them and then just let them air dry and I use fresh media. I will reuse my media all the time, but not for starting seeds. For starting seeds I use clean containers and fresh media.

Farmer Fred

Knowing you, I bet those containers become clean at the end of the season, not the beginning of the next season.

Debbie Flower

They become rinsed out at the end of the season when I empty a container of a plant that either I put it in the ground or it didn't survive. I washed the container out right away. But if it's because the plant didn't survive If I want to know why it didn't survive, did it rot? If it rotted, then I throw the media out. I do not save it. If it just dried out because the battery on my automatic irrigation system died while I was out of town, then I will reuse that media.

Farmer Fred

All right, we've planted that seed. I bet that seed wants some bottom heat.

Debbie Flower

Yes. And our container needs to have drainage, right? So we don't have that buildup of moisture. Yes, bottom heat is ideal. I spent years starting seeds without bottom heat, because I didn't have the money to invest in it. Then we got rid of our water bed and I use the the heater for the water bed, which works very well. If you see one at an estate sale or someplace like that, snap it up, the temperature is perfect. And the size is nice, and they're water resistant. So I used that for a long time. That was all I had. And then I was able to buy an official heat mat for starting seeds. And that helps tremendously. You get much more even germination. It's faster germination. And it keeps the media warm. You can start in an unheated greenhouse, as long as you've got that bottom heat as long as the media is warm.

Farmer Fred

And when you have that bottom heat, you will get around probably 70-75 degrees, it'll get off to a good start.

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TOMATO SEED STARTING TIPS, Pt 2

Farmer Fred

Let’s get back to our conversation with Debbie Flower about successful tomato seed starting.

Farmer Fred

Just because I don't trust the seeds, I will start several seeds, like three seeds in a three inch container, thinking Oh, two of them aren't going to make it, And I'll have one, that I can just leave in the three inch container. Well, of course, they all sprout. So that means I have to, at some point, transplant them into their own three inch pot. What is the ideal stage for doing that?

Debbie Flower

When you see the first true leaves.

Farmer Fred

The first true leaves. Not the second or third, but the first true leaves. It that because there's less roots and thus less damage?

Debbie Flower

Yes, that's the danger in in thinning. If they're right next to each other, you're going to risk losing both of them if you try to separate them and put them in their own containers. At that point you would thin and when you thin, you take scissors and just cut one off. If you've planted them as if I'm going to go your route, I will try to plant them in three different corners of the pot if I think I'm going to separate them over time. And then I'll just cut the media apart and use that the plant in a column of media and move it into another container.

Farmer Fred

Giving them room to grow is very important. That's one thing I've learned over the years is that as that tomato grows, you realize that tomato is going to be growing and growing quickly for about eight weeks before you can transplant it into the yard, when the time has come, when nights are above 50-55 degrees on a regular basis. And the soil temperature is also above 55-60 degrees at that point, as well. Give it room and don't be shy about using your one gallon containers. That's to move those three inch plants into a one gallon pot. That will let them take up a heck a lot more room and more water. Yes, for a short period of time, you're gonna have healthier plants, and possibly sooner tomatoes, right? I did that last year, a little test with the variety I think it was Bodacious I tried this on. And I tried, as I did for years, just growing them in that three inch pot until the end of April, and then planting them in the garden while hardening them off the last couple of weeks of April, gradually increasing them to more light and more wind. The ones in the one gallon container, I transplanted back in the first week of April. So they had four weeks in that one gallon container. And I planted that, at the end of April, I planted the three inch pot at the end of April. I also planted them at the beginning of April to to see well, what will happen in that situation. And they really prefer being planted at the end of April, when the soil is warmer here in USDA zone nine. And did I get tomatoes sooner from the ones in the one gallon containers? No, but it was close.

Debbie Flower

It was a fun test. When you put them in the field. Did you bury their stems?

Farmer Fred

Yes, of course. And even by then if they're in a one gallon container, they could easily be a foot and a half or two feet tall. Right? And instead of burying them, I lay them in a trench.

Debbie Flower

Yes, you don't want the stems necessarily to go very deep. There isn't as much oxygen in the field soil deep down, as there is near the surface. So yes, you create a trench, and tomatoes can be buried up to there. Just a couple leaves at the top, you can bury almost as much as you want.

Farmer Fred

So you gently move that head up so it's sticking above the soil. The trench itself would be six inches deep and wide and whatever the length is, including the root ball. Do you point the roots down in a trench?

Debbie Flower

No.

Farmer Fred

The roots can figure it out. Okay, they're smart.

Debbie Flower

Yeah, they have what are called tropisms. And that's reaction to a stimulus trope. Geotropism is reaction to gravity and roots grow toward gravity. Okay. Stems grow away from gravity.

Farmer Fred

Another benefit of our friend Mr. Gravity, roots know which way to go? Yes, they do. And you don't need to strip the leaves?

Debbie Flower

You do not.

Farmer Fred

All right. And again, that's going to be at the time of the year that's appropriate for your area for planting tomatoes. For a lot of people. It's Mother's Day. And that's fine. By the way, you don't have to do all this tomato planting on one day like April 28. You could do it here in USDA zone nine from the end of April, all through May, through the first part of June.

Debbie Flower

Depending on how long the growing season is you have. Some plants and tomatoes will produce in 55 days, that's probably the shortest season tomato, cherry tomatoes. So if you have a growing season of 55 days, you just want to make sure that you plant at the beginning of that and get your tomatoes at the other end. If like here we have, I don't know, how many? 200 days? We have 180. We have a very long growing season. And so we can plant over time and have different crops maturing over time.

Farmer Fred

It is not uncommon for me to put in tomato plants in June because somebody always says, “Hey, you want to try this?” And me being me. goes. “well, yeah, sure.”

Debbie Flower

You’ll find a place for it.

Farmer Fred

And so yeah, it's fine. It's because we can get 80 days of growing, even if you planted in mid June, right? If you're in Minnesota, that’s not so. Also, if we're in Truckee, California. It's 6000 feet of elevation or whatever it is.

Debbie Flower

Yeah. Much shorter growing season.

Farmer Fred

“We call it July”, I was told. I don't know if I ever told you this story. But I was visiting a nursery up in Truckee, which is in the Sierra, on your way to Tahoe and Reno. And it's at 6000 or 7000 feet. And there was a nursery there, much to my surprise. I figured, well, I can learn a lot here about planting in a really short season climate. My first question to the owner was, “can you grow tomatoes here?” And the owner said, “Yeah, we have a good month. It’s July”. Okay, that's it, but it's like, the only month where they have never had a freeze.

Debbie Flower

That is amazing.

Farmer Fred

And I went to their book rack. Remember books, folks? And the book rack had the Sunset Garden book? But Ii was the Sunset Northeastern garden book. The one that they were selling in New England, basically. So like, if you garden in Vermont or Maine or up that way, you would have the northeastern garden book,a much smaller book than the Western garden book. Yes, but perfect, if you live in Truckee, yes. For the plants that would do well there.

Debbie Flower

Yes, there are places that can't grow tomatoes well, like the Pacific Coast properties that butt up to the Pacific coast, because the nights never get that warm.

Farmer Fred

Well not only do they not get that warm, but they also have a lot of humidity and maybe mildew to contend with which tomatoes don't like. Now I am sure that somebody from San Francisco is going to tell us about their tomato patch.

Debbie Flower

Yes. And that's where you get into season extenders, covering the plants and trapping heat, things like that.

Farmer Fred

I'll tell you exactly where there is such a garden. It's the Call House and garden, the call garden. You should drive up there and see it. The call house and garden is north of San Francisco, it would be in Sonoma County. And it's part of Fort Ross.

Debbie Flower

Oh, I've been there.

Farmer Fred

Okay, well, behind Fort Ross is a house. And it belonged to the Call family. They actually bought Fort Ross back in the late 1800s. And they raised cattle there and they also had an apple orchard there. But they also had a garden his wife wanted a garden. So, being a clever guy, Mr. Call planted rows of eucalyptus against the prevailing wind that came in right off the ocean. They were right on the coast. Yes. And there was this three or four layer thick rows of eucalyptus trees that protected this small patch of land. And they had a wide variety of vegetables and flowers that they could grow there. In that environment.

Debbie Flower

Good exposure to southern sun, I would think would be important. Yeah.

Farmer Fred

Yeah. There's plenty of sun when, when it comes out.

Debbie Flower

That's not always often.

Farmer Fred

Yeah, it's like maybe four hours a day or five hours a day. But still, you plant the right varieties. Right plant in the right place.

Debbie Flower

And there are some tomatoes now that produce what's called parthenocarpic. Meaning that they do not have to be pollinated to make fruit, kind of like a seedless orange. And that can be beneficial if you never get those sunny days when the bees are traveling. Right.

Farmer Fred

All right, so just enjoy your tomatoes. By the way, we should answer this question too. Do you need to prune that tomato plant?

Debbie Flower

You don't have to. I was doing some reading about that. When I gardened in New Jersey and I got my bachelor's degree in horticulture in New Jersey, we were told to prune just so we had two main stems. Tomatoes produce what are called suckers. Think of them as branches that arise between the main stem and the leaf. And this method of pruning in New Jersey took off every sucker except the first one. And we staked them, tied them to a stake and got tomatoes early and enough of them. But here in California, where I live now, if I did that I wouldn't get tomatoes, I would get fried tomatoes, they would be exposed to way too much sun, and they would dry out and burn. And so there can be a happy medium. Lately, I have not been pruning my tomatoes, because I want protection from the very strong sun, protection of the fruit from the very strong sun. And the research shows that you don't necessarily get any more tomatoes with pruning, but you can open them up so that they're easier to see easier to handle, that kind of thing.

Farmer Fred

There are two popular tomato brush fires on the internet about pruning. One is take off the early flowers, so you get more fruit later on. And the other is prune out those armpit hairs, the suckers that grow in the crotches of the stems in order to direct the growth to the existing foliage and fruit that's on there. And both of those are premises based on research that didn't have much to do with the backyard gardener. It usually had to do with greenhouse production on a short season basis. And so basically, you don't have to prune if you don't want to. Cornell University even bluntly said, when you prune off tomato flowers, you get fewer tomatoes.

Debbie Flower

Yeah, absolutely true. Absolutely true. Yes. If you leave the suckers, they grow to be their own branches that have flowers and fruit on them themselves.

Farmer Fred

They're tasty too. Yeah. Exactly. All right. Did we cover it? Did we get the tomatoes planted? Did we get them grown?

Debbie Flower

I think we did.

Farmer Fred

All right, let's go kill some tomato worms. Debbie, thanks for your help.

Debbie Flower

My pleasure, Fred.

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TOMATO SEEDLINGS NEED LIGHT, MOVING AIR

Ken from Palo Alto

Hi Fred. This is Ken from Palo Alto. And this last year I started growing my tomato plants from seed. Starting last January, I did various varieties, including Better Boy, Early Girl, Cherokee Purple, etc. And all the plants seem to be a lot skinnier and less hardy in March, when the garden center varieties came out. The plants also didn't seem to do as well in general. Is there any hints of what I could do better next year to grow hardier seedlings? Thanks again for all your advice. And I value your expertise. Thank you.

Farmer Fred

Thank you, Ken from Palo Alto, in the San Francisco Bay Area. He contacted us via Speakpipe. If you'd like to give us a question, I hope you could use Speakpipe.com. It's very easy. You go to speakpipe.com slash gardenbasics, and press the button and away you go. We would love to hear your voice here on the Garden Basics podcast. Debbie Flower is here, our favorite retired college horticultural professor. It sounds like Ken may need, I'm thinking, more light.

Debbie Flower First of all, congratulations to Ken for starting his tomatoes from seed and getting a plant. You know, that's a hurdle that not everyone gets over.

Farmer Fred

But it's a good hurdle to get over just because there is just so many more varieties available.

Debbie Flower

Yes, seeds, yes. And January was about the right time to start tomatoes from seed in Palo Alto. So good timing. I think you're right, I think light is one of the factors that he may need to increase. And the other one that came to mind for me was wind. Plants, he said they're thin, plants will be thin, unless they're challenged by movement. The experiment was done by shaking a greenhouse table for 10 minutes a day. I'm not into shaking the table. So I use a fan and that shakes the stem of the plant and makes it thicker, it'll be a shorter, stouter plant. 10 minutes a day is is a good amount. And so I use an oscillating fan that goes back and forth and makes those stems move. If you've ever had a cast, have you? I have not had a cast on on a limb an arm or leg something like that. People who have to have broken bone have an arm and a leg have to wear a cast that immobilizes that part of the limb, for I think it's about six weeks. I'm sure it varies. But when they take the cast off, that limb is very weak. It's thin and weak. It has no muscle on it because it hasn't been used. That's what I liken the tomato that has been grown without wind, it's the one that's been in the cast. The one that's grown with wind is the one that has been able to exercise all those six weeks and create muscle in your plant. It's called reaction wood.

Farmer Fred

Reaction wood. Yes, yeah. Ken didn't give us very many details about how or where he's growing these seedlings. And I have a funny feeling, if it was just in a sunny window. They would be rather bent.

Debbie Flower

Yes, yes, he talked about thin but he didn't mention bent. But they would bend toward the light, right? He may have turned them daily and gotten them to grow straight or straighter, but that won't thicken them up.

Farmer Fred

Right. And a fan is a great idea and maybe one of those indoor type greenhouses that's basically a plant rack with a set of fluorescent lights or LED lights above it that you can adjust the height. And a lot of people don't put those lights close enough, right to the seedlings, it has to be just a couple of inches above.

Debbie Flower

Yes, and they need to be, in the case of fluorescents, they need to be relatively new, not the ones you take out of your office, because you're putting new ones in the office or whatever, they need to be relatively new. Fluorescent light bulbs decline in quality over time. And they need to be very close, it needs to be a very strong amount of light. In a class with students, I had them use light meters and measure amounts of light close to the windows, let's say, and then a foot away, and the amount was incredibly different. Much less light a foot away from the window. Close to a fluorescent bulb and a foot away, the amount of light declines very quickly when you get away from those light sources. So the light over tomato plants, either LED or fluorescent, would be ideal. Because they're cool sources of light and you won't burn the leaves. You have them so close to the plant. Should be max two inches over the plant.

Farmer Fred

And you would want it on a rack where you can easily adjust the height of the lights to allow for the plants to grow, right.

Debbie Flower

And those are made, like you said, sort of like indoor greenhouses. One setup I had was in the guest room of a house and I hung eyebolts in the ceiling and chains from the eyebolts and a fluorescent fixture on the chains. And so I could raise and lower the two ends of the fluorescent bulb and move the plants around so the taller ones were on one side and the shorter ones on the other side and keep the light approximately two inches away from those plants.

Farmer Fred

And in my experience with fluorescent lights, the longer ones are better than the shorter ones. You can buy fluorescent bulbs as small as a foot long, but I always opted for the three foot long in a dual fixture where you could mix a shop light with a cool light bulb that had sort of a blue hue to it.

Debbie Flower

Right. Fluorescents do come in and I'm an LED is for sure do come in different colors. You don't have to spend the money for a full spectrum bulb to grow seedlings. If you want to bring something to flower and fruit then, yes, you do. But just to grow seedlings to start your tomatoes for your vegetable garden, you don't need a full spectrum light bulb. But you do need the blue spectrum and the pink spectrum. The one that you use in the bathroom will be will be the pink one because it makes you look lovely. And really yeah, I know that it makes your flesh look beautiful. And then there will be the cool ones, which are the more office type bulbs. But they should tell you whether they're in the blue spectrum, which is cool. Or the warm spectrum, which is the reds and you want one of each. So yes, you want a fixture that will hold two bulbs.

Farmer Fred

And for those of you born in the 21st century, yes, LED lights are the way to go.

Debbie Flower

They are, if you've got the fixture and the money, they've gotten a lot cheaper.

Farmer Fred

Yes, they have and they're very adjustable. Some are on like goosenecks, where you can just sort of bend it to get closer to the plant.

Debbie Flower

If you're doing a bunch of plants, and he mentioned 1-2-3 cultivars, that one gooseneck may not be enough, right.

Farmer Fred

As far as fertilization of the seedlings, with that help at all?

Debbie Flower

Hard to tell. He didn't tell us anything about the color of the plants, I would use color of the leaves and the stems as an indication of deficiency. If they're a good green color, then whatever he was doing is probably sufficient. But if they weren't, if they were showing yellow, then that would indicate a lack of nitrogen, but "weekly, weakly". Weak fertilization done on a regular basis is the best thing for the plants.

Farmer Fred

Ken, thanks so much for your question, Debbie Flower, thanks for your help on this.

Debbie Flower

Oh, it's a pleasure, Fred.

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Farmer Fred

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