My seedlings...or "they are maybe dead"

Posted on May 30, 2006 at 04:38

Well my seedlings for my heirloom tomatoes are not doing well.  In fact, they might be, well probably ARE dead.  They were growing in egg cartons which I don't think I'll ever use again.  Probably too shallow?  If anyone has experience with that, let me know.  Then one day I went out there and they were gone.  Just dirt remained.  Did they shrivel up?  I have no idea.  The same thing happened to my herbs and my broccoli and eggplant.  They were out in a rain storm, so I brought them inside for a week then outside again and they were doing ok and then nothing.  So I'm pretty sad about that.

I took the dirt that had the tomato seeds in it and planted them in the garden and I'm just praying they'll grow again, but I think it's a lost cause.  So today I took the kids out to the garden store and we bought a few tomato plants (hybrid, yuck) and some other plants for our garden:  one zucchini and one summer squash to get us going while our seeds grow, onions, romaine lettuce, basil and oregano, jalapenoes, white eggplant and some flowers for our little turtle planter.

My cilantro and bush beans are growing great...that's all that's growing great so far. 

This morning we planted cucumbers, peas, spinach and radishes.  Tomorrow we'll plant some more things.  We gave up early because it was very hot out. 

Untitled Comment

Posted by morganalilith on May 30, 2006 at 06:19 - Link

starting seedlings in egg cartons never worked well for me. i think there are a couple of reasons. they're too small, so there's not enough room for the roots to spread out, and since there's so little soil, they dry out too quickly.

i've had better luck with containers the size of storebought single-serving yogurt. i've also had good results from transplanting the seedlings into larger containers a time or two before they're ready to be planted out. in addition to giving more room to the roots, i think the stress of moving to a different container makes them more hardy in the long run.

more recently i've experimented with making starting pots from newspaper, like this http://www.uaex.edu/news/january2006/0113uap1.htm but i made mine a bit smaller. you can buy a little wooden gizmo like this http://www.seedsofchange.com/garden_center/product_details.asp?item_no=S14924 to make it easier. i think it's cool, but haven't seen the sense in spending the money, when any container of the appropriate size will work just as well as a mold.

as to whether your tomatoes will make a comeback, my best guess is 'maybe'. i've found heirloom varieties to be pretty hardy, and on one occasion had a plant grow back after being nibbled to the ground by a rabbit. and that brings me to my guess about your plants... usually if they just up and die, you'll find a shriveled wisp of it on the ground. if they're all completely gone, i'd guess they were eaten by something. :-(