- Hi, thanks for joining us for The Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South.

I'm Chris Cooper.

It's winter, but it's about time to start warm-season vegetables from seed.

Today we'll show you how to grow tomatoes from seed to transplant into the garden.

That's just ahead on The Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South.

- (female announcer) Production funding for The Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South is provided by the WKNO Production Fund, the WKNO Endowment Fund, and by viewers like you, thank you.

[upbeat country music] - Welcome to The Family Plot.

I'm Chris Cooper.

Joining me today is Natalie Bumgarner.

Dr. Natalie is a residential consumer horticulture specialist with UT Extension.

Good to have you here, Dr. Bumgarner.

- Oh, always good to be on The Family Plot, Chris.

- Yeah, we appreciate you coming on down from Knoxville to join us.

All right, so guess what?

People are already asking about transplanting, right?

Tomatoes, but we're gonna start from seed to transplant to the garden.

- Yeah, the seed catalogs have been coming for a while, right?

- Yes, they have been.

- So yeah, so they're ready.

- Okay.

- And actually, I guess we would probably start maybe with timing.

- Okay, let's do that.

- And so tomatoes are something that we will start as a transplant to be most efficient with our gardening season.

I mean, in some parts of the country you have, you know, a long enough season you could direct seed, but we typically don't, and so most of the time, we'll say about six to eight weeks would be a good time to get those transplants going.

And in the more sunnier southern parts of the country, right?

The more light we have in that January, February, March, April time period, the faster many times, you know, those plants will grow.

So the earlier we are, we might be a little bit on the longer end of that timeframe.

- Okay.

- I can say that, you know, for a specific example, our frost-free date in Knoxville, Tennessee is right around the 15th of April.

Well, I don't aim for planting on the day when we hit that 50% frost-free date, so lots of times I'll aim for in the ground, you know, in those last couple of weeks of April or right around the 1st of May.

- That's good.

- And so I will typically then count back six to eight weeks, and be putting my, you know, seeds in the transplant container between about the, you know, 5th and 10th of March, you know, is pretty common.

- Okay, so that's a trick.

Make sure we count back to six to eight weeks, okay.

- Yeah, and as a general statement, there's lots of times that I would rather have a slightly young plant go in the ground than a very mature plant.

- And why is that?

- Well, I mean, the more, you know, say we have a 12, fifteen week old transplant that's just been sitting in a small transplant cell for a month, you know, while we're waiting for the soil to warm up or get a garden prepped.

That's just more time for stress to be put on that plant.

- That makes sense.

- Now, if it's in a large container and it has room to grow, yeah, there may be chance of some early fruit, but oftentimes what I see is just stressing out plants in, you know, small cell packs.

- Okay, got it, got it.

Yeah, we don't wanna stress those plants out.

Good, okay, gotcha.

- So we figure out our timing, and then comes the fun part, well, honestly it's all fun, but the fun part of selecting the cultivar.

- All right.

- And so of course, you may already know what your favorite tomato is, but I would always suggest try a few, you know, a couple new ones.

There's great breeding that's going on right now, and so we have more of disease resistance.

We have a lot of compact cultivars that do well in containers and raised beds.

We're just getting a huge color profile, all sorts of novel, small cherry fruits, right?

So you can get literally almost, you know, any color, shape, size that you prefer, and so- - We can tell you like that, don't you?

Those different varieties and sizes.

- I do love the multicolored.

- And we should say this though, you know, depending on where you are, check with your local Extension service.

- Yeah.

- They may have publications about tomatoes for those different varieties that you're talking about.

- Yeah, absolutely, and so here in Tennessee as well as across much of the country, our local researchers are doing trials, so you know, we have recommendations that are best for our area, and many, many other states do as as well.

And so one of the big decisions is determinate versus indeterminate, right?

- Yes, can we define that simply, please?

- Yeah, so we get to get into a little bit of physiology, which we always love to talk about, right?

[Chris chuckling] So indeterminate would kind of be your heirloom, or what you think of as a traditional tomato type, and so it continues to produce leaves and flowers throughout the course of the whole growing season.

Large stature, we need lots of support, and the fruit tends to arrive, you know, over a longer period of time, but you know, more consistently.

- Okay.

- Determinate plants have a small, naturally occurring, I mean, it's a genetic mutation, but it's, you know, completely conventionally bred now, and it just stops that formation of new leaves after a certain period of time, and so it keeps them more compact stature, and so we call those determinate, where they terminate at a certain point.

Yeah, okay, and so you know, they'll just produce leaves and flowers and leaves and flowers, and then you'll get to the top, and you'll just see a group of flowers, and that's the top of the plant.

And so they are a more compact habit, but they also can harvest, you'll harvest fruit over a more concentrated period of time, but for canning, right?

So this depends on your uses, but also your spaces.

- Got it.

- Yeah, and there are lots of great determinate cultivars that do well in containers.

I actually, some of these then I have some examples here are Patio Choice Yellow, which is a compact determinate cultivar that's done well in recent trials.

So you may want a indeterminate slicer that you get beautiful beef steak tomatoes, but you may also have some determinate paste tomatoes, 'cause you wanna do, you know, a chunk of, you know, sauce or salsa or something, so you can mix and match those and then some cherry tomatoes for yourself.

- Who doesn't like cherry tomatoes, right?

- Yeah.

- Good deal, all right, so what about materials?

So let's make sure we talk about that, so what do we need?

- So we wanna start with good container, and I brought a few examples.

This is what we would call kind of a solid flat.

There are holes in the bottom.

You can't see them, but drainage as well.

Yeah, and then you can just seed over the top.

I also brought one of these trays that has a whole lot of, wow, actually, you see a lot of roots coming out the bottom there, but it has a whole lot of individual cells.

So if you're gonna grow a lot of one cultivar, open flats can be handy.

I like these because it allows a lot of different cultivars to be grown.

You can see there's some basil, there's some tomatoes, some older ones, some younger ones, and so it just kind of depends on how many different cultivars you're gonna grow, what your space is.

But making sure that you can drain well is essential.

- All right.

- Yeah, then we want growing media, right?

- Okay.

- So germination mixes tend to be a finer material.

Lots of times they'll have vermiculite, which is the kind of shiny, it's actually a clay material.

You might also see some perlite, so it might be peat moss, it might be coconut core, but we have good water holding capacity and we have good drainage.

- Gotcha.

- We don't wanna just go and grab a bag that says potting mix or something like that.

We want a good germination mix, because this is actually organic materials, but non-soil, so it's made to drain well and provide a really good environment.

- And I noticed you keep saying drain well, so that's very important, right?

- Yeah, yeah, we do not want water ponding in any of our containers, and honestly, you can tell me, you know, if you've experienced this.

I think that people drowning out and rotting seeds is often one of the biggest problems.

- It is, it is, I will concur with that, exactly right, yes.

- Yeah, and so we'll see damping off and other elements that could be caused by a low temperature.

Oftentimes they're caused by a saturated media.

Literally just loving and taking too good care.

- Aw, they just wanna make sure they're well watered.

Yeah, I got you, okay.

- And for cool-season crops, it's a little bit more fluid.

They can germinate at cooler temperatures, but if we're going tomatoes, peppers, I also really like a heat mat.

So this is actually a large heat mat.

You can germinate four trays full, as many tomatoes as you can possibly want, but this, one of the reasons that I really like these larger ones is because they actually have a little, you know, temperature probe and a thermostat where you can set the temperature that you prefer.

So you can just, you know, put this in the media right where you're seeding, and for tomatoes, peppers, I like to get that between 75 and 80.

- How about that?

Okay.

- Yeah.

- That's good.

- It's really just, I mean, it's amazing how much of a difference it will make when you have the right media temperature, because if, you know, if you're in the house, if you're in the garage, and it's 65 or 70 degree air temperature, you really need to get that soil temperature up to that, you know, 75 to 80 degrees.

- Wow, okay.

- Yeah, so and then, you know, depending upon your site, you might, like, I have a little dome here.

You might, that can, you know, increase the humidity.

- Yeah.

- If you've got a small greenhouse or something, do not put that where it's getting direct light.

You can, it can get pretty warm.

- Yeah, you can bake 'em.

- Yeah, yeah, so there's, you know, other tools that you can use, but a good container, a good media, and an ability to provide the temperature is crucial for germination, and then really, really soon, you know, we'll need to move on to good lighting as well.

We can talk about that maybe a little bit more when we get to care, yeah.

So we have a good cultivar selected.

We're at the appropriate time of year to get, you know, a month and a half, two month old seedling in the ground, and then, you know, we have our good material, and we're ready to seed.

So I can kind of just demonstrate, you know, if we have, if we want a lot of one cultivar, we could literally just open seed, right?

So I wanna make sure that we have a well moistened, not dripping wet, but a well moistened media, and you know, we can literally overseed, yeah, we can scatter.

- All right, - Make sure we tag well, right?

That is one of the challenges, you know, that we always run into, or we can also, lots of times, if we're seeding in a small cell or a row like this, I'll kind of create myself a little bit of a ditch there, and then direct seed, and most of the time we will cover, but we don't need to cover very much.

- Okay.

- So just a little bit of light cover.

Sometimes I'll just use like a plain vermiculite or something that's really easy to sprinkle over the top.

We don't wanna get too deep.

All we're really doing is making sure that our seeds don't rapidly dry out.

- Gotcha.

- These tomatoes, peppers, they're all fairly small seeds.

They're not like a big bean or corn that we need, you know, a lot on top of, so a light cover and then- - So these don't even have to be covered.

I mean, that's fine.

- I mean, if you can keep them moist enough.

- Okay.

- But chances are, you're gonna have a little bit of variability in the moisture, and so most of the time, we will go ahead lightly and, you know, and just lightly cover so that we make sure the seeds don't dry out.

Interestingly enough, when we grow microgreens and some of those other crops, lots of times, we'll grow them without covering.

- Okay, wow.

Didn't know that.

- The whether seeds need light to germinate is a whole, you know, broad physiological topic.

There are some that do.

Most of the time those kinds of factors have been bred out of our common vegetables.

- Okay.

- So most of the time we're just more managing the environment than we are those physiological conditions.

So we'll cover lightly, we'll sprinkle with water, kitchen, you know, faucet.

If you need the spray, you know, the sprayer on the faucet, right?

Because we don't want a mass volume of water.

You can get special nozzles that are kind of mist.

We just don't wanna move the seed or, you know, wash it around too much.

Get it on the heat.

- Get it on the heat mat.

- Yep, yeah, and if you are growing in you know, a garage or something like that where there's not a good amount of natural light, you'll want to, within the first few days, make sure that you have supplemental light, because it is amazing how fast they will stretch once they germinate, if they don't have light.

- Gotcha.

- Yeah, so for tomatoes, under good conditions, we're thinking five to seven days when they're coming up, and you know, it comes on you fast.

So lots of times what I will do is just have my light set up already ready- - Oh, okay.

- When I germinate.

This is just an example of a four bulb fluorescent setting that I brought with me.

Of course, you know, it would hang.

- Sure.

- Would hang up above your plants.

But if you just go ahead and get that all set up at the same time, then you're ready, and you can prevent any stretching that will happen when germination occurs.

- So what about the height of setting your lights?

- Yeah, so for the most part, you know, we can be anywhere from, you know, four to eight, ten inches above the plants.

and I mean, it depends on how many lights you have.

This is a four bulb system, but we can start actually, you know, fairly closely, and then lots of times, we'll just be able to move.

I've got these, you know, these cute little- - Oh, fancy.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Look at you.

- So you'll always want to keep that, you know, a little bit above the height of the plants.

- Okay, that's good, that's good.

- And when it comes to, like, we have base, you know, calculations, you know, you'll wanna be four to six inches above the tops of the plants, but you also are gonna want to use the cues of the plants.

- Got it.

- Do they start to, you know, look a little thin and- - So we're gonna be watching those seedlings, okay, gotcha, because they will let you know, obviously.

- Yeah.

- Okay.

- Yeah, so too much light, too little light, and always pay close attention to the seedlings, and then you can just adjust that height as you go.

- So lemme ask you this.

So what if it's too much light, so what would we see?

What would those seedlings exhibit?

- Yeah, so sometimes in really too much light, you could actually see a little bit of bleaching.

- Okay.

- You might see a stressed appearance that could be, you know, in color, but most of the time, people will have the lights too high, and we'll start to see the plants stretching, reaching.

- Trying to get to that light, gotcha.

Yeah, that makes sense, okay.

- So sometimes your germination mix will come with a little bit of fertilizer already in it.

You know, look at the bag, make sure that you know what you're dealing with, and if it does, then you've bought a little bit of time there, but if it doesn't, then by the time you get kind of to the transplant stage, you'll want to be thinking about, you know, a dilute soluble fertilizer solution.

Now, we don't wanna over-fertilize, but I actually brought a few not great looking plants so that we could kind of talk about these.

And so this would be, you know, an example of a hungry tomato, right?

So we're starting to see some purple on the veins.

We're seeing yellowing on the leaves, and this is simply a plant that should have been transplanted a couple weeks ago, and I bought them on purpose, because I kind of wanted to just share the concept that honestly, I would rather plant something smaller, you know, and younger than something that has experienced some stress or some nutrient deprivation that's older.

So these would be like a a month old type of seedling, and these are only a couple weeks old.

- Wow, just a couple of weeks.

- Yeah, so kind of in that two to four week range, then you wanna think about transplanting.

- So lemme ask you this, do you prefer a soil media with fertilizer or without fertilizer?

- So I actually kind of like a germination mix that has just a little bit of fertilizer in it.

And then lots of times what I'll do is, so that'll get you through this stage.

- Okay.

- And then when we get up to a larger container, then I'll think about, okay, what's gonna be my fertilizer routine?

And I'll build in a once a week or so fertilizer schedule.

So I kind of like it, it just helps you prevent hungry- - Yeah, hungry and stressed.

- Yeah, before you get to transplanting.

- Okay, makes sense.

- Yeah, so two to four weeks is oftentimes, you know, that window when we would think about transplanting.

These little tomatoes are on the young side, but they would certainly be fine if we, and we will actually demonstrate here some transplanting.

Most of the time say we might wanna wait till we start to see true leaves, and actually, these are the cotyledons right?

The seed leaves, and if you're thinking those don't really look like tomatoes.

- You said true?

- Yeah.

- Okay.

- And then the true leaves would be the leaves that really do look like tomatoes, and they're actually just starting to come there, and it will be amazing how fast these plants will grow.

So honestly, I don't really have any trouble in transplanting at this size if we want to.

You can see nice light, fluffy growing mix there, and what we wanna do is just, you know, in this tray specifically, it was easy to get up under the plants, and then I just kind of lifted them out.

We wanna disturb the roots as little as possible, and that's one reason why, especially in a small tray like this, I don't really have a problem transplanting 'em when they're kind of young, because then we don't have a lot of roots to disturb.

We think about these- - Yeah, that's a lot of roots.

- These plants right here, we have a lot of entwined roots there that we're looking at, and so we'll damage and stress those plants more in the process.

So we just want to remove a single plant.

This is actually, we could transplant up into a variety of different containers.

- Okay.

- This is a 18-cell tray that just has individual plant containers, and I like this for say, a gardener who wants a couple plants, so several different cultivars, because then you can put a tag in each one of these, and it's a simple way.

You can do the six-cell packs, which we're all really familiar with.

- Yeah, yeah.

- You know, those are 6, you know, 6-0-6s, and we'll get about 36 plants in a tray.

So that's totally up to the gardener.

One of the things that I like about these 18 cells is you have a lot of growing space there, and you can go right to the garden from here.

- Okay.

- Yeah, so these just have a germination, I mean, a grow mix in there, and so you can see pretty good size perlite there for good drainage.

There have been times when we've run out, and I've accidentally used a germination mix in these large containers, and it slows down the drainage, because the material is finer.

So then we'll just make a little dibble with our finger there in this nice loose mix.

- So not too deep, right?

- Not too deep, although on a tomato, it's not a huge thing, and sometimes, especially when you get a taller plant, you'll try to get that deeper in the container if you can.

In this particular instance, the transplant is small, you know, we don't need to, but we know that tomatoes will root from their stems, and so it's fine if we want to get them down in there a little bit.

You know, if we had a larger plant like this, we'd try to get him deeper in that.

But honestly, with the, you know, kind of with the stress that these plants have been under, it's not all that uncommon that in, you know, a few weeks, this younger guy might, you know, might actually be ahead.

So we'll transplant into our container, and then water in.

- Okay.

- And the water in will settle that media around those young roots, because we want good root to media contact to allow them to take up moisture and really get going and growing, and then if, depending upon, of course, people's growing environments, they probably will want to then take that back and get it under very well lit, you know, setting.

Warm, later in the season, they might have a place where you could get a natural light, and then you are using good care until you get to close to the garden stage.

- Wow, so just good care.

Now, once we get close to the gardening stage, what about hardening off?

That's usually a question we get quite a bit at the Extension office.

- Yeah, and so hardening off is really the process of letting the plants physiologically prepare for the outdoor environment.

So if they're coming from a beautiful greenhouse environment or the very well lit, nice humid environment with good temperatures that you're providing for them as you grow them at home, what we really wanna do is transition them to what will be outdoor temperatures.

- Okay.

- Outdoor humidity, because especially if they're coming from a greenhouse, they're going to be experiencing a drop in humidity, and so that's gonna impact how their leaves move water, and so there can be some changes that take place in the leaves, as well as wind, right?

- Ah, didn't think about that, yeah.

- Yeah.

- You can dry 'em out.

- Yeah, lots of times they've been used to a very still environment, and so getting some air movement in there, and then bright sunlight, yeah.

And so lots of times for hardening off, what we'll do is start with a couple hours a day outdoors.

It involves, I will say, a lot of carrying.

[Chris chuckling] This even happens to me in my trial tomatoes.

The month of April is a lot of work.

- So back and forth?

- Yeah, a lot of back and forth.

Under ideal conditions, you might have a, you know, a shade structure someplace where you wouldn't have to move them as much.

I move them in and out of the greenhouse a lot.

So you'll wanna start with shorter periods of time, and then just get them so they're spending all of their time outdoors for a week or so before you put 'em in the ground, and that will help you prevent leaf damage and some of that transplant stress that'll slow them down once they get going, and then get 'em in the ground, give them some fertilizer, and it's gonna be April and gardening season before we know it.

- It'll be ready to go.

- Yeah.

- So is there a certain height, you know, that we need to get the transplants to before they, you know, start hardening off?

- So oftentimes I will kind of let the calendar help me make those decisions.

Obviously, you know, we wanna get them up, you know, eight, ten inches or so.

But you kind of wanna think about the calendar, you wanna think about what the current conditions are, because I don't wanna start hardening if we're just about to get a cold snap.

I had one crazy spring day where I began my hardening right before a thunderstorm and a hail event occurred.

It was crazy.

So you wanna avoid any potentially damaging weather, but there have been times when, you know, if there's gonna be a cold snap, I'll kind of wait 'til after that passes to get into my hardening phase.

But I'd like to get a couple weeks of transitioning them to outdoor conditions before I get to my plant date.

- So we gotta follow the calendar on that.

- Yeah.

- That makes sense, okay.

- Now, this is a kind of a general statement, but I think that a lot of times people have larger than necessary expectations for what they're gardening tomatoes.

They'll think, you know, I need my tomato to be a foot tall and blooming before it goes into the ground.

And sometimes, you know, a nice stocky 10-inch plant that hasn't been stressed, that's roots are in good shape can go and really perform well in the garden.

- So it makes the difference.

- Yeah.

- Doc, that was so good, yeah.

So from seed to the garden.

- Yeah.

- How about that?

- Yeah, seed to sliced on your sandwich before too long.

- Oh, that sounds good.

Thank you much, we appreciate that, great information, great information.

Remember, we'd love to hear from you.

Send us an email or letter.

The email address is familyplot@wkno.org, and the mailing address is Family Plot, 7151 Cherry Farms Road, Cordova, Tennessee 38016, or you can go online to FamilyPlotGarden.com.

That's all we have time for today.

Thanks for watching.

If you want to learn more about growing tomatoes from seeds, we have links to Extension publications on our website, FamilyPlotGarden.com.

We also have lots of videos about planting other vegetables.

Be sure to join us next week for The Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South.

Be safe.

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