Potting Up the Tomato Seedlings and Other Sprouting News

I start most of my seedlings in a non-nutritive seed starting medium like coconut coir or peat moss. So once the seeds have germinated, I pot them up in a growing medium that can actually support life.

Every single tomato variety had sprouted. It made me so happy. Some people are able to grow huge amounts of zucchini, summer squash, or cucumbers every year. But for me, tomatoes are the one thing I can count on to fruit in large amounts.

All the tomatoes were potted up into individual six pack cells (modules). But in so doing, I went and killed the one and only Pruden's Purple tomato seedling, which is supposed to be a potato-leaved pink tomato. So now there are 23 varieties of tomatoes and a total of 61 tomato plants.

6 of 9 pepper varieties have sprouted: Shishito, Antigua, Syrian Three Sided, Yellow Monster, Corno di Toro, and Poblano have all sprouted. These are all sweet peppers except Poblano which is considered a mild to medium heat. The Poblanos are going to be used as a stuffing pepper. I'm hoping to freeze lots of different peppers for the winter. The 3 that haven't germinated are from old seed from 2008/2009. I dug around the tray with a toothpick and some of those old pepper seeds are looking plump, so there is still hope.

Normally I grow lots of hot peppers for salsa, but we still have salsa canned from previous years. Sweet peppers grown in close proximity to hot peppers can actually become spicy due to cross pollination because a lot of the heat in peppers are contained in the interior seeds and the membranes the seeds are attached to.

7 of 10 eggplant varieties have sprouted: Aswad, Bangladeshi Long, Ma-Zu, Ping Tung, Malaysian Dark Red, Thai Long Green and Thai Long Purple. Eggplants always seem to be the last to poke their little heads out of the soil.