Introduction
Hi Everyone,
This is my first post in a Hive Garden community. I am from Seattle area, state of Washington in Northwest USA. I have originally found Hive via Splinterlands and around August of last year I have started becoming more serious about Hive and started venturing out outside the closely knit Splinterlands community into other communities on Hive.
I am now regularly posting in Actifit community as fitness is my other hobby along with Gardening. In terms of gardening I used to be a lot more into gardening and plants when I had a large property, now we have a very small backyard so I focus on growing some flowers and my favorite vegetable: Tomatoes!
Starting Tomatoes From Seeds in my Hydroponics System
Our climate in Seattle is not best for growing tomatoes as our summers start late, temperatures are a bit low for tomatoes and it is a short growing season so the most sure tomatoes to grow are the early varieties, such as Early Girl. I am not a big fan of those types of tomatoes as I prefer growing heirloom tomatoes as they usually come with thinner skin and more flavors than the commercial tomato varieties.
This is why a few years ago I have ordered some seeds from the Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds in Missouri and have been growing my own tomatoes in the tiny backyard for the last three to four years.
This year I am a bit late starting the seeds as a lot of things have been going on in my personal life as well as professional life. Usually I start my tomatoes at the end of March, so I am at least a couple weeks late. Because I am late I might skip a step where I assemble a mini hot house in our backyard and keep the young tomatoes in it for the first month or so.
This means I will be able to plant the tomatoes in the large containers without having to replant them again. When I use a mini hot house I cannot fit twelve large pots in it.
So the first step was to use a fertilizer and add it to the water:
After that I have discovered that I am really poorly prepared this year, turns out that I didn't have enough seed pods for the twelve tomatoes. So I had to improvise, I took some of the seed pods and cut them in half:
That helped bring the number of pods to the maximum for the system. But it turned out that I was also missing my plastic plant tags. I could only locate two of those from last year, so I had to improvise again and use the old fashioned paper tape as labels for each pod :)
Does your partner/family get involved in gardening?
My daughter helped me label and plant all of the tomato seeds. When it comes to helping in the garden she is always up for the challenge! And everyone is definitely up for the challenge of eating the tomatoes :)
Hopefully documenting my process will help me be more prepared and on time next year when I start my tomatoes.
The seeds are now on the way to sprouting and I will report back on the progress in about a week.
