Repotting tomato seedlings

To get good results from summer tomatoes it is best to start the plants indoors in a propagator or individual pots and repot them to larger pots two or three times before the plants go outdoors. Now if a good time to be starting tomatoes from seed, preferably starting a small batch every week for the next few weeks.

Once the miracle of germination has occurred and the small seedlings emerged, it is important to move the seedlings to larger pots as they grow. The process is relatively easy and simply requires some careful handling. Removing the small plants from the pot is easier if the soil in the pot is quite dry, maybe not watered that day.

The soil block should emerge in a single piece, if it crumbles away this means the soil was maybe too dry. Gently separate plants. At this stage the plant roots are small and should not be mixed together, making it quite easy to separate them. Ideally the roots should remain in small soil mass.

Some gardeners say handle small plants by only the stem or only the leaves. If you handle carefully that will do. Place plant into half filled pot then gently infill around plant and firm down. It is useful to bury part of the stem in this process as the buried stem will produce additional roots. This is useful at each stage of potting up.

With the potting up complete, and the pots labelled, gently spray water the soil several times over the next day or so. It is hard to be exact with the amount of water for seedlings indoors but certainly not as much water as it appears out the bottom of the pot. Better little and often to keep them damp but not wet.

It will still be several weeks until these small plants are ready for hardening off outdoors. They can visit outdoors on warm days but should be indoors at night. Not too much direct sunlight is best to encourage root development at this stage. In a few weeks the plants will go into larger pots to further encourage root growth.

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