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Produce => Edible Plants => Topic started by: davholla on February 10, 2021, 20:14:29
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Does anyone do this and any advice? I might go to Dobbies next weekend to buy some.
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Yes. I sow in modules with bottom heat and plenty of light for the seedlings so they don't get etiolated.
In a normal year I'd be swing now but it's cold and grey and dark and wet and that would mean problems for pricking out seedlings and keeping them happy so I'm waiting a week or two more.
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This is how I do it
http://www.thegardenersalmanac.co.uk/Content/T/Tomato/Tomato.htm
(http://www.thegardenersalmanac.co.uk/Content/T/Tomato/Tomato.htm)
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I wait till March in UK, otherwise the plants get inconveniently large while still needing protection from frosts up till the second half of May here.
I find it’s fine to sow five or six seeds in a 3” pot and prick out from there. As Tee Gee shows on his link, the advantage is that you can bury the stalk of the seedling up to the bottom leaves making for stockier plants.
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We use the TeeGee method described above, don't rush at it we have 50+ heritage varieties so grow exclusively from our own saved seed. We will start ours in mid-March in a propagator, move out to a cold greenhouse, prick them out when they have true leaves and put into position by the end of April.
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I have started my Red Alerts here in Portugal and the rest will go on this week. The weather is blerg at the moment but warm enough to sow..
I think Toms are fairly easy from seed - I just sow in rows in little trays and prick them out into pots. I used to ferry them out to the ploy tunnel in the UK and keep an eye on the temps at night and bring them in if needed..
In the UK my Red Alerts went on at the end of Feb and everything else a 2-3 weeks later.
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I'd imagine almost everyone on this forum grows from seed. It is just so much more economical than buying plants. Standard varieties often cost no more than a couple of quid for perhaps 50 or more seeds, and even F1 types probably no more than three quid for 15. It is hard to find plants at much less than 3 for £10, even for standard varieties.
My only word of caution. Don't start too early, and end up with large plants that are difficult to look after inside but cannot be planted out because they might get frosted. Follow TGs advice. The seeds germinate easily in the correct conditions and, in my experience, are good for several seasons
But if you do decide to buy plants that's fine but (and I'm deliberately shouting now) NOT YET!!
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I’d also add that it’s easy to save your own seed (see Real Seeds for guidance) and as long as they’re not F1 (or rarely have a different kind of flower from usual) they will come true to that variety. That way you don’t even have to pay a penny for your plants.
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When I sow seeds I don't bother too much whether they are F1 or not. Some of the varieties I have grown from seeds over the years come from tomato tasting sessions I would visit at the Tomato association's stall at Tatton Park Show.
I have one variety that I have grown for over 25 years which I brought back from Feurtaventura.
How that came about was as we ended our holiday there was one tomato left in the fridge so I put it in my pocket with a view to eating it at the airport but I forgot about it so when I got home I saved the seeds from it .....the rest is history.
Needless to say I have it labelled as "Feurta"
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As the March plant fair where I have previously bought small plants of heritage toms is again cancelled this year and I was not impressed by the varieties on offer in the GCs I ordered some seeds on Thursday. They arrived in the post this morning which is impressive. Itching to sow some now and chillies to put it's still perishing cold here and very dull. Supposed to get warmer soon so finger crossed.
Varieties are:-
Rose de Berne; La Carotina; Orange Banana; Costoluto Genovese and Red Pear.
I grew Yellow Pear in our first year and we loved it and it self sows in the polytunnel tho I suspect the chooks will have nabbed any seeds lurking in the soil. Great eaten fresh for a nibble or a salad and really nice semi-dried then kept in olive oil for bruschetta. Hoping Red Pear will be as good.
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I have Orange banana and persevere with it although I find it prone to blossom end rot, probably my regime rather than a issue with the variety.
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In our first year here I grew some tomatoes outside and some in the polytunnel with great success - very exciting after years of failure in the colder Belgian garden
Since then I've grown all my tomatoes in the polytunnel - purely cos I'm waiting for OH to make another bed in the veggie plot and have no other spare space - and last year I installed a seep hose. I found it far more efficient than my previous system of putting the sprinkler on and the fruits developed well and foliage stayed healthier too for not having a regular shower.
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I installed a seep hose. I found it far more efficient than my previous system of putting the sprinkler on and the fruits developed well and foliage stayed healthier too for not having a regular shower.
Not only that, I think this method reduces the chances of blight attacks, as it reduces the humidity around the plants meaning the leaves are dryer and less prone to floating blight spores sticking to them.
This is why I use sunken bottomless pots to water into which is my way of keeping the surface of the compost relatively dry!
Then of course there is the type of root system that Tomatoes have i.e. the top roots are feeding roots and the bottom roots are moisture seeking roots. So seep hoses and sunken pots directs the water down to where it is needed most!
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Good to know. Thanks Tee Gee.
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I'd imagine almost everyone on this forum grows from seed. It is just so much more economical than buying plants. Standard varieties often cost no more than a couple of quid for perhaps 50 or more seeds, and even F1 types probably no more than three quid for 15. It is hard to find plants at much less than 3 for £10, even for standard varieties.
My only word of caution. Don't start too early, and end up with large plants that are difficult to look after inside but cannot be planted out because they might get frosted. Follow TGs advice. The seeds germinate easily in the correct conditions and, in my experience, are good for several seasons
But if you do decide to buy plants that's fine but (and I'm deliberately shouting now) NOT YET!!
Actually quite a lot of people I know are quite happy to buy plants from a shop because then you can pay as little as £2 per plant (2020 prices).
But we'd be crazy if we didn't take cuttings from them... Here's how it makes sense.
1) You scout the nurseries/superstores and some supermarkets to buy the best tom plants you can find from late March through April - ideally ones that already have side shoots - they will be much bigger and more mature than anything you can grow at home (even with my heated propagator and LEDs).
2) You take off any side shoots as cuttings (if they are less than 3cm wait until they grow to 4cm) - these will grow on to be only 10cm shorter than the parent when it crops, and more importantly they will inherit maturity so they crop only about a week later.
3) If you are worried about the space* they need before the first frosts then take off the top for an even quicker cutting. This encourages the side shoots even more. In my experience you can get 6 cuttings off a plant before the last ones' cropping falls more than 2 weeks behind the parent. *Obviously you use all your windowsill space - it's worth pointing out that more mature plants are much better at coping with a windowsill that isn't properly double glazed - whereas seedlings would just die. BTW never leave a half-hardy plant between curtain and glass, especially overnight.
The big downside is that the only good varieties you will find are Gardeners Delight and Sungold - but there's nothing better anyway.
There's a lot of new stuff being trumpeted every year, but none of them have a better flavour - certainly nothing Blight-resistant (Crimson Crush is the best of an appalling bunch).
Shimmer has a meaty flavour (very like Green Tiger) but isn't in the shops yet.
The only other one I grow from seed is Piccolo/Piccolino - it's nearly as good as Sungold, but the flavour is unique.
Also you can buy about 1000 Piccolo seeds for £2 if you buy a punnet from any big supermarket - and then you'll taste for yourself how much flavour you will be growing. They always come true.
Cheers.
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I have Orange banana and persevere with it although I find it prone to blossom end rot, probably my regime rather than a issue with the variety.
I found the same..
I have never bought a tomato plant but I do take cuttings from my own. I am tempted this year as they are 5 for €1 at the market, they are small though and I couldn't see a variety named on them.
The joy of seed, for me, cannot be surpassed and sowing tomato seed is always a reminder that the season is underway. I guess it has become ritualistic.
It has been nice to see more variety of plants in my old local garden center recently - nothing wrong with Shirley and Ailsa Craig but variety is the spice of life and in recent years I have seen more heritage types creeping in.
Dare I also suggest that flavour isn't quite everything? I know everyone loves Sungold (I'm not overly keen on GD) but they are prone to splitting and they can get a bit repetitive over the season (and they do fruit for ages). I grow some toms for pasting, I grow some that look good on the plate, I grow some for drying and of course I grow for flavour but not just a sweet Sungold hit. Green Zebra are great fried, Orange bananas make a lovely looking and tasting paste, Black Krim are fantastic on a burger or for making Pan con tomate
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Tomato seed also keeps forever - I had some last year from a pack at least a decade old that germinated just fine.
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Tomato seed also keeps forever - I had some last year from a pack at least a decade old that germinated just fine.
Only buy sungold seeds. All my other toms are either from the old 'pass the parcel' or their descendents. Mainly varieties not particularly well known in Britain. I usually chit the number of seeds I want and generally get 100% germination despite some being well over 10 yrs old.
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No plant fair for my usual heritage toms last year and no seeds except a few very old ones that didn't germinate well - except Green zebra - so I bought tomato plants from the GC - generally unimpressed with them especially Sungold which cropped forever but lacked flavour. I ended up cooking them down to make jars of passata till I got fed up with that too and fed them to the chooks once they arrived in late September.
They liked them.
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Tomato seed also keeps forever - I had some last year from a pack at least a decade old that germinated just fine.
Only buy sungold seeds. All my other toms are either from the old 'pass the parcel' or their descendents. Mainly varieties not particularly well known in Britain. I usually chit the number of seeds I want and generally get 100% germination despite some being well over 10 yrs old.
This is good to hear as I have so many seeds which are from the seed circles of last decade. Yesterday I tried to work out which were the oldest and started about 16 varieties.
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I dug out some Sungold that someone here had grown on and selected for size - they must be years old but I got about 90% germination!
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Actually quite a lot of people I know are quite happy to buy plants from a shop because then you can pay as little as £2 per plant (2020 prices).
But we'd be crazy if we didn't take cuttings from them... Here's how it makes sense..
Also you can buy about 1000 Piccolo seeds for £2 if you buy a punnet from any big supermarket - and then you'll taste for yourself how much flavour you will be growing. They always come true.
Cheers.
You make some excellent points.
I've nothing against buying plants if you can find them at a suitable price.
Also the extra economy from taking cuttings is one of those things that isn't difficult but I never seem to get around to.
Thanks for the tip about piccolo. It's easy to fall into lazy thinking. No one saves F1 types as they cannot be relied on to come true. Out of interest do you know of any other good quality shop varieties that are not crosses?
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Thanks for the tip about piccolo. It's easy to fall into lazy thinking. No one saves F1 types as they cannot be relied on to come true. Out of interest do you know of any other good quality shop varieties that are not crosses?
The best sweet pepper by far is the orange version of the "mini"/"snack" type, also sold as "Chiqino". The red ones in the mix are just normal flavour and the yellow ones are halfway between, but the orange ones are really distinctive - its a waste to chop them into a salad - you need to eat them raw as a side dish to really make a difference.
They keep quite well off the plant and the plants have some ability to fruit into December if moved into the warm (I grow them in the PT in buried pots so I can move the whole plant into the house in October - some survive winter and fruit another season).
The fruit are so expensive that I do very occasionally need to use 2nd generation seed - and I haven't noticed any drift yet.
I also found an orange corno type once that had the same flavour, but I've never seen it since so I'm on 4th or 5th gen seed of that. In the past I've seen such marvels stay true then suddenly stop germinating - so far so good - fingers crossed.
I didn't actually say Piccolo is non-F1 either and I don't need to care - as long as the offspring's fruit are indistinguishable from the parent type. There's certainly no risk of crossing in the original greenhouse - Piccolo is big business - such a big deal and big premium that there will be nothing else in range, probably for miles...
I need to buy Piccolo from the supermarket 9 months every year anyway because they are available when I can't grow them (and the alternative is shop tomatoes with no flavour), so I'll never have to use 2nd generation seed until it's pushed off the shelves by something inferior (this can happen in a recession - eg. I used to be able to buy toasted/roasted pumpkin seed oil until the last one, but when the economy recovered the idiotically expensive olive oils reappeared on the shelves (up to £50 a litre - diminishing returns gone mad to the Nth power), but not even Waitrose sell RPS oil now... That would probably be out of my price range anyway - it used to sell at less than twice the price of good Greek extra virgin.
I've never been convinced that F1 veg gives any really significant benefits apart from uniformity. When F1 became "a thing" I was pretty inexperienced - but it seemed to me that at the time it had concentrated on crossing two quite different strains to get a genuinely important combinations like salt-tolerance with higher yield, high yield with disease resistance etc. etc. It was also widely used to get unusual flower forms/colours for the ornamental market.
If I remember rightly, all the above involved wide differences between parents - often different species and sometimes a different genus.
On the other hand most of the F1 seeds we buy these days are in-species crosses (and the wider crosses aren't always labelled as such).
If you cross two really good tomatoes you usually get a good tomato as the result - I tend to be trying to avoid crosses, but eg. Green Tiger seeds are hard to source since M&S stopped selling the tomatoes (and since Highlander seed ceased to be available), so I'm stuck with tolerating a bit of crossing - I've had a strain of oval ones, and a strain of pointed ones (almost a thorn on the bottom), but since they only had Piccolo, Sungold and Gardeners Delight to cross with the results have never disappointed.
I'm pretty sure the new "Shimmer" is a good Green Tiger variant so I will continue growing its offspring's offspring until it appears in the supermarket.
It's much harder to stop squashes crossing, but I've had a few good crosses (completely unintentionally) - like Turks Cap X Crown Prince made what I call "Green Turban".
The moral of this is that if you only grow your absolute favourite flavour varieties you are less likely to need to dump their offspring.
Cheers.
PS a) There's no guarantee that the 2 "ideal F1 parents" have been chosen for flavour - every seed we buy has been selected for a few characteristics - flavour is often way down the list. Occasionally a commercial variety like Piccolo has a good flavour despite this, and in the case of Piccolo it also has a unique flavour - this is the jackpot (though some people prefer bland fruit and hate everything different and, some even dislike anything that wasn't fed to them by "Mommy" - I'm the opposite).
PS b) In winter you may find Piccolo punnets from "Planet Thanet" and other farms that grow them in the UK under LEDs - the flavour is indistinguishable from the summer supplies, often better than their winter rivals from sunnier climes.
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Vinlander,
Many thanks for the comprehensive and fascinating discussion.
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The punnet of Piccolo in the kitchen was grown by Lee Smith of Teeside.
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My only word of caution. Don't start too early, and end up with large plants that are difficult to look after inside but cannot be planted out because they might get frosted. Follow TGs advice. The seeds germinate easily in the correct conditions and, in my experience, are good for several seasons
And who do you think did start too early and is now struggling to look after 16 very large tomato plants but is still worried about frosts for a couple more weeks. Yup. Yours truly. No alternative but to risk some of them. I'll watch the local forecast and try to rig some sort of cover if necessary.
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I’m assuming it’s pretty safe to plant out now. Weather forecasters seem confident that nights will be mild for the next week, and a frost in the last week of May in the middle areas of England would be extremely unlucky.
So for me, it’s busy planting out time for tomatoes, squashes, beans, courgettes .... Such cautious joy!
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I’m assuming it’s pretty safe to plant out now. Weather forecasters seem confident that nights will be mild for the next week, and a frost in the last week of May in the middle areas of England would be extremely unlucky.
So for me, it’s busy planting out time for tomatoes, squashes, beans, courgettes .... Such cautious joy!
Now that is an interesting comment. I had mistakenly thought that being in the middle areas of England made late frosts more likely, and coastal areas enjoyed a dampening effect from the surrounding seas cooling the hottest weather but making sub zero temperatures less likely. So I was being cautious
But the risks are definitely easing day by day. Just need the rain to stop. Inches of rain in March, almost none in April, but once it returned in May well above average ever since. Slug heaven!! I'm trying wool pellets this season. I hate seeing those carefully nurtured runner beans blitzed by slugs.
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I have loads of ready to plant out tomatoes waiting to be hardened off.,,, I’m not quite brave enough to risk putting them out just yet!
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We have thousands too, started planting up in the greenhouses/poly but giving the outdoor another week at least, (it will take us that long to do the rest!)
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I have bitten the bullet and planted my plants out this week, and as I had my camera out I took a few shots of the garden for future reference purposes!
see below;
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It's all looking very organised and healthy. Well done Tee Gee.