Planting Tomato, Strawberry and Chilli Seeds
Melbourne is still in lockdown and doesn’t look like it will lift any time soon so instead of planting seedlings this year I’ll try again with growing from seed! Here I’m planting Roma and Siberian tomatoes alongside Cayenne and Birdseye chillies with some Temptation strawberries as a real experiment.
This post will cover a few weeks of progress for the seedlings
I planted the seedlings on 8/8/21 - these are the varieties I went with (I ran out of room to plant the coriander - I may plant those directly into the vegepod later).
I decided to try these Peat Pots this year especially for the chillies which are rather susceptible to transplant shock. These pots are able to be themselves planted directly into another pot and break down without needing to remove the seedlings from their pots in the hope I’ll have some more success. I used normal seed raising mix and labelled each section because otherwise I’d instantly forget which was which!
I’m also using a small “greenhouse” with a tray so I can sit the seeds inside the house beside the window as it’s still too cold outside for seedlings, even with the greenhouse roof.
This next photo is two weeks later on 21/8/21 where the first of the tomato seeds are beginning to sprout.
I regret not taking a photo between the sprouting and this one - I planted 2 or 3 seeds per pot to hedge my bets and hopefully at least one seed out of every pot would sprout and nearly every single seed (from the tomatoes and chillies) sprouted. I thinned them out by snipping the weaker of the sprouts at the base (instead of pulling them out) to not disturb the fragile roots of the remaining sprout.
These photos are from 8/9/21 where all of the tomatoes and chillies have sprouted and are starting to grow their true leaves, with only some sprouts from the strawberry seeds. These are the tomato seedlings with the row of thus-far-rather-unsuccessful strawberries:
And here are the chillies, some of which I still need to thin out when I’ve identified the stronger seedling:
I’ll let them grow just a little more before replanting into larger pots.