Buy Your Tomato and Pepper Transplants, Don't Start from Seed
Okay. This one's going to annoy some of you, because half the gardening world is very proud of starting everything from seed on a windowsill under grow lights. I get it. I see the seed catalogs too.
Here's my actual advice for your first year: don't do that. Buy your tomato and pepper starts from a nursery or garden center. Skip the seed-starting altogether, at least for these two.
I know that's contrarian. Let me tell you why I think it anyway.
Our season is too short to spend it learning a second skill
Starting seeds indoors is its own whole thing. You need the right light, the right temperature, the right timing so the seedlings are ready to go out but not leggy and stretched and sad by the time it's warm enough here. That's a skill. It takes a season or two to get right, and most people mess it up the first time in ways that don't show up until it's too late to fix.
Meanwhile our actual growing season, the stretch between "safe from frost" and "frost again," is short. Our last frost can sneak into late May. Our first can show up by late September. That's not a lot of room. If you spend four weeks of it finding out your seedlings got too leggy under a bad grow light, or damped off because you overwatered them, you've burned time you don't have.
A nursery has already done that work. They started those tomatoes weeks ago in a controlled setup with people who do this every single day. You're buying a plant that's already past the fragile part. All you have to do is not kill it after you get it home, which is hard enough on its own the first year.
Learn the garden first. Learn your frost dates, your soil, your watering. Get fancy with seed starting in year two or three once you've got the rest of it down.
What to actually do
When you go buy your starts, here's what I look for.
Stocky, not tall. A short thick stem with good color beats a tall skinny one every time. Tall and pale usually means it was stretching for light in a crowded greenhouse.
Not already flowering or fruiting. It's tempting to grab the one with a little yellow flower on it already, because it feels like a head start. It's not. A plant that's already trying to make fruit in a small pot has been stressed into doing that early, and it'll struggle more when you transplant it. Grab the plain green one next to it instead.
Check the roots if you can. Gently tip the pot and look. You want white roots filling the space, not a solid mat circling round and round, which means it's been in that pot too long.
Buy a few more than you think you need. Something always gets lost. A cutworm, a bad transplant shock, a dog. I always buy one or two extra of whatever I'm most excited about.
A word on timing, since we already talked about this
Don't put these out in mid-May just because that's the date everyone in the neighborhood says. I did that my first year, put six tomato starts out because a neighbor told me to, and a 29-degree night flattened every single one of them. I stood out there the next morning with my coffee looking at those plants like they owed me money. They were done. Whole waste of a Saturday and twelve dollars in transplants.
Wait for your actual last frost, and honestly wait a little past it if the nights are still dipping. Tomatoes and peppers are both warm-season plants and they will sulk, or die outright, in cold soil and cold nights. There's no prize for planting first.
One more honest thing
I write everything down in my garden journal, including which variety I bought and how it did, because otherwise you forget by next spring what worked. My drawings in there are rough. I sketched a squash leaf once and showed it to Keith and he asked if it was a map. Fair. I'm not an artist. But the notes next to the bad drawing tell me exactly what I need to know for next year, and that's the whole point. Nobody's grading the picture.
Do the same with your tomato and pepper starts. Write down the variety name, where you bought it, and what happened. In two or three years you'll have your own list of what actually does well in your yard, which matters more than anything a catalog tells you.
Before next time: figure out your average last frost date if you don't already know it, and start keeping an eye on nursery stock so you know what's available when it's time to buy.
- D