When I Start My Tomatoes And Peppers
When I Start My Plants And Why
In this blog, we will discuss when we start sowing our tomato and pepper seeds. We will also explain when our plant date is and why we start sowing our seeds early.
Tomatoes
First, we will write out a list of the tomatoes we want to grow that year. Next at the beginning of February we start sowing my tomato seeds. We always sow more of each variety than we need. The reason we do this is that we know we will lose some of these plants along the way. If we would just so say 1 or 2, and we lose both. Then we can not have that variety that year, this is what happen to us last year. But thankfully we grew out more than what we were going to actually plant, this is what saved us. There were a few varieties we had to restart, but it gave us enough time to do so since we started in February. They say start your seeds 8-10 weeks before going into the ground. Our plant date here is May 15th. So by that date we should be starting our seeds at the beginning of March to mid-March. But we start a month to a month and a half before that. The reasons just in case we lose any by up potting, the cold, hardening them off, or when first going into the ground at first the weather and rodents. Also, the other reason we start them so early is to get big and strong plants to go into the ground, and they are more mature and start fruiting sooner.
Peppers
We used to grow peppers before we got into tomatoes. This season we are going to grow some rare and super hot peppers to offer on the site. Peppers we do the same thing as tomatoes, and that is we start more than we need. Also, by doing this is you have left over plants you can give them away, donate them to a food bank, plant the extra ones, or sell them at the farmers market. We start my pepper seeds at the end of November to the first week of December. The reason for this is that peppers take so long to get to their fruiting stage. So we make sure they are mature before going into the ground, so they will start producing outside a lot faster instead of at the end of the season.
Note When Planting
You want to make sure to get your plants into the ground as fast as you can. The reason is they will grow faster. The old rule of thumb was more roots, more fruits. Next, if you get the plants into the ground faster, their root system has room to expand where in a small container it can not. We planted all my tomato plants from May15th to May 25th. The pictures below we took in the first week of June. Some plants were already in the ground for around 2 weeks or a little more, some were only in for around a week or a little more. But you can see how fast they take off once in the ground.
