Tomato seedlings in homemade cassettes in egg trays
CASSETTES OF TOMATO SEEDLINGS IN THEIR TRAYS UNDER YAYA ON A "TWO-STOREY" WINDOWSILL
I want to write about my favorite culture - about tomatoes. I begin to prepare the land in May, after planting all the vegetables. I fill the tank (previously it served as a boil-out, where the laundry was boiled) half-filled with garden soil, pouring a bucket of humus, mix and add young nettles, previously crushed. I fill it to the top with earth and sand, spill it with an EM preparation, sow mustard, mix the top layer and close the lid.
After five days, I remove the lid, and the mustard sprouts. I give her two or three weeks to grow, then I cut and plant three marigold bushes.
Is it troublesome, you say? Not at all. It's like I'm preparing a flower bed. I put the tank where the plants will cover its sides, and my flowers grow in clover. In the autumn, after the first frosts, I grind the marigolds and plant them here in the soil, water them again with an EM preparation and bring them into the greenhouse - let the microbes work longer without frost. And in severe frosts, I open all the doors in the greenhouse so that the ground there is thoroughly frozen.
Around March 10, I sow tomatoes - one seed of each variety, and I have about 60 of them. I always sowed in small cheese bowls, but last spring I changed traditions. In articles I have seen more than once that cucumbers are sown in halves of eggshells, and I thought, why not try to sow tomatoes in plastic cassettes from under 10 eggs? They will live there for nothing, three weeks. I took the cassette, opened it, thought that the earth would spill out of it, and put a strip of thin cardboard there.
She sifted the earth through an old colander and applied it with a spoon: she put one, watered it from a spoon too (and later watered only from a spoon!), put a seed and covered it with another spoon of earth. Next I put a bag of seeds of this variety with the name down, and so on all ten varieties.
I did everything on the newspaper so that there was no dirt on the floor, although no matter how carefully you work with the earth, it will manage to crumble somewhere.
On the planted cassettes I put numbers from 1 to 6 (I use 6 cassettes). I pick up a pack of 10 bags, turn it over so that the first package is on top, tie them with an elastic band and insert the cassette number under it.
I don't write anything else.
So I sow five cassettes. And with the most beloved varieties, I do this: I sow them in two pieces - I put the first seed in the first cell, the second in the cell under the first, and so five varieties.
I insert each cassette into a plastic bag from under the bread, during the day I put it on the battery, and at night three cassettes on top of each other - and in the refrigerator. I think it's very convenient.
When the seeds began to hatch, I put them on the windowsill. I cut off the lid and put a cassette with earth in it - here you also have insulation for a cold window sill. By the way, I also insulate it with what I find on the farm.
Say, there is not enough space in the cells? I also had such an idea, but such an experiment involuntarily turned out: two seeds sprouted later, I did not wait for them, and transplanted all the rest when 2-3 true leaves appeared. Then all hands did not reach them, and I transplanted them much later, when they reached a height of 10-12 cm. And did they grow very strong!
I do a transplant (transshipment) into cups from sour cream, yogurt, etc. I dig out with a spoon, I don’t even dig it out, but I scoop up all the earth with sprouts - this way the roots are not injured at all, in my opinion, they don’t even notice that they have been transferred somewhere. I no longer sift the earth into glasses, but put the undecomposed remains on the bottom of the glasses, pour a little more than half of the earth, transfer the sprout on a spoon into a glass, make a recess with it and leave this sprout with the earth in the hole. I'll wait on the sides, fix it - that's all the work.
I water immediately with pink potassium permanganate. Gradually add earth. I sow the rest of the seeds for open ground all together in one bowl and transfer it also into glasses, on which I write the name of the variety. I put glasses in cookie boxes.
And here I allow myself to disagree with the opinion of Boris Ivanovich Pustovalov (“Between the Window, the Table and the Garden”), who claims that it is better when 28 boxes of tomato seedlings are placed in a box, and not 12. For me, 12 is definitely better than 28.
I think that if the leaves touch each other, then they are already cramped on the windowsill! I'm building a second floor.
I turn on the backlight from ordinary energy-saving light bulbs. I don’t fertilize anything at home: my pets have enough of everything that was laid in the ground in the summer. I water only with melt water.
Reference by topic: Seedlings of cucumbers FROM A TO Z - K.S.KH. SCIENCE
AUTUMN IN THE GREENHOUSE
I scattered superphosphate on the ground in a handful on a bed of 1 × 8 m, loosened it with a flat cutter, removing green manure to the side, along the wall of the partitions. She dug two grooves with a depth and width of a spade bayonet, laid the earth side by side, along the grooves. I did all this so that the earth would freeze deeper in winter, and warm up faster and deeper in spring. And she removed green manure for the same, because the black earth heats up faster. I never change the land in the greenhouse, so I have to freeze it, then sow green manure. And the summer green manure that raked aside fell under the earthen ridges. In the fall, I sow mustard again. So I leave everything until spring.
In the spring, while there is still a lot of snow, my grandson and I throw it into the greenhouse with a layer of 30-40 cm. After a week, I sprinkle it with ashes to melt faster. When the earth dries up, I free it from the remnants of mustard, moving them to the side. The sun warms the ground and warms the grooves, while I fill green and brown plastic bottles of any size with water and lay them around the perimeter of the greenhouse. I sow mustard again, about a week later, and while it sprouts and then grows, the earth warms up deeper and deeper.
In mid-April, I take out seedlings, I cover them for two or three days from the scorching sun, and at night, of course. I put everything in the same boxes in which she grew up at home, I just put a board under them, because the ground is wet and the boxes get wet. I cover with lutrasil in arcs.
When I plant in the ground, I don’t make holes - I put it or put it (depending on the length of the seedling). Previously, on the bottom of the grooves, I lay the husks of onions, garlic, its arrows, cut with a pruner. Under the roots I cut off the mustard that has grown in the grooves, I cover all the seedlings and the groove with all the “garbage” with earth.
I tie a tag with the name of the variety, cut from milk bottles, to each plant. In each tag I pierce a hole with a carnation, insert a piece of copper wire. On the tags I write the name of the variety with a marker. All this is done with a long-range sight - from phytophthora. But I don’t pierce the stem, I just tie a wire to each plant, since phytophthora has not visited us in all eight years of the greenhouse’s existence. Probably because it is always dry there, because I only water in bottles of 1-5 liters dug upside down.
But when planting, I water as usual and in the first month I also pour under the roots. Only when the tomatoes grow confidently, I water and feed them in bottles.
A few days later I tie them to a twine, which is stretched above the ground at a height of 50 cm, and later - to a wire under the ceiling. I mulch with nettles. I feed a couple of times with chicken manure and mash (sugar and yeast) and spray it with boric acid two or three times.
Last spring, we built a new greenhouse, but we were late with the completion of the work - at the same time we were building another garage. Planted seedlings at the age of almost three months! And I will not say that this had a negative effect on the harvest: the fruits began to turn red in the first half of July. I have not harvested such a crop in my greenhouse for a long time!
We built a two-layer greenhouse so that it gets warmer early in the spring and colder later in the autumn. Well, to keep the wooden frame longer. What will come of it, I will write in the future.
Reference by topic: Seeds and seedlings from A to Z - choice, preparation, sowing, etc.
SEEDLING TOMATO IN EGG TRAYS - VIDEO
© Author: Lyudmila Andreevna ZYANKINA. D. Ust-Sarapulka. Udmurtia.
Below other entries on the topic "Dacha and garden - with their own hands"
- Large varieties of tomato - the secrets of growing
- How to tie tall tomatoes in 2 stalk - my way
- Cultivation of early-maturing tomatoes in a greenhouse
- Growing tomatoes - planting and care: my secrets and tips (Nizhny Novgorod)
- Gnome tomatoes - my review of growing (Volgograd region)
- Cultivation of dwarf varieties of tomatoes and cherry tomatoes in a greenhouse.
- Is it possible to grow tomatoes and cucumbers together in one greenhouse - my reviews
- Growing tomatoes CHERRY - planting and care, reviews of varieties
- Growing of lian tall tomatoes
- Tomato variety "Yasha Yugoslavsky" - my reviews
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Some gardeners will probably swear, but this is how 1 grandmother taught me. In order for tomato seedlings to grow healthy and stocky, once a week or two I spray them with plain water from a spray bottle. I also run my hand over the grown seedlings to slightly agitate them. That is, I create stress, which ultimately benefits the plants. They also get stress when picking. I cut the roots of each seedling slightly, at least by a millimeter, and plant 1 in a new container.
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For seedlings of tomato and other seedlings in February-March, there are catastrophically few on the windowsills. And this is a fact! Once upon a time, I also thought that with the advent of spring, especially on sunny days, it is enough for plants. This is wrong! Only at the end of March, seedlings can "breathe freely", and even then, if there are no clouds. After all, not only the intensity of lighting is important, but also the length of the day: March 21 is the day of the equinox, when daylight hours are conditionally equal to 12 hours. But in the morning, this is not enough. Now is the time to go shopping and find the right lamps.
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Gardeners write about tomatoes like this: you complicate everything, but I make it easier. And then there is a long story - no easier than all the previous ones. We, too, used to work hard - we prepared the soil, mixed all the components, soaked the seeds, and so on. But it turned out that we are already living in a different time, when we can and should make our lives easier.
In short, our actions look like this: we soaked the seeds, planted them, sprinkled the soil twice. Further, only watering without any top dressing.
And if in more detail, then a couple of times we spend time from 1 to 15 minutes.
1. Take a disposable transparent container with a lid 11x7x4. We take two squares of toilet paper, put it on the bottom of the container, moisten, drain the water. We lay out the seeds, close the lid and put them in a dark place for 2-3 days - we spent 1 minute.
2. Through the lid of the container, you can see how the seeds hatched, tails appeared.
3. We take glasses after milk 500 g, pour 1/3 of the purchased soil. As the seedlings grow, add 2-4 tablespoons of soil, usually twice until completely filled. The operation is performed after watering.
So, they poured 1/3 of the soil, watered it, made a hole with a pencil and lowered the germinated seed. We put the glasses in a fruit box, which includes 12 pieces. And send it to the window. Spent 15 minutes.
Recently, we have come to the conclusion that tomatoes began to be sown for seedlings in April. Everything is growing. Light day has already been increased, backlighting is not needed. Do not complicate your life with tomatoes - they are very tenacious plants.