Starting my Tomato Seedlings for the Spring Season

Hi, I'm Anthony from Sydney Backyard Veggies. Today is the 13th of July and I am going to make a start on my spring plantings by starting off my tomato seedlings today. I do like to get an early start on my tomato seedlings when I'm to get it planted out by mid-August in my patch. And so today's video I'm going to show you what varieties I'm going to be growing and how I start these seedlings off. In my gardening context I like to get my tomatoes in early. We don't suffer much frost here in my local area here in Sydney so I'm happy to get my tomatoes started in and planted out in the garden in about mid-August. And the trick for me in doing that is it allows me to harvest a lot of my fruit before the fruit flies turn up in my area in that mid-December time. I like to do at least two plants of tomatoes in my patch. One in August and a varieties I have a strong preference for commercial hybrids. I do find that they grow more rigorous than heirloom varieties and they're also a lot more disease resistant. In terms of specific varieties I grow in my patch for the last four years I have been growing Dankia. This is a medium-sized slicing tomato and it produces amazingly. It's actually an early producer I find in my patch. I can get the first tomatoes after vines in that mid-November time. Produces a lot and it produces consistently same uniform shaped tomatoes and it produces well until the fruit flies turn up in that late December period. The second tomato slicing variety I grow is Thunder. Now Thunder is very similar to Dankia in the sense this is a medium-sized slicing tomato. I find that the Thunder fruit is slightly larger than the Dankia but not as bountiful in its harvest. You get more tomatoes out of Dankia than you do Thunder. This year I'm going to be trying a new variety of Ox Hearts. I found this online I said I'll give it a go. I always like to try new varieties in my patch. This one is called Arandinio. Again another commercial hybrid. Haven't tried it yet but I've heard good reviews on it. I'm going to give it a go in my patch. Also like to plant out a cherry tomato. The variety I like to go for is Sugarino. I haven't got any seeds at the moment but I've got some on order and I'll be getting them started soon. These get really big. They get very big and very bushy and I find that you constantly need to prune these tomatoes but once they start producing they produce for weeks and big glots of fresh cherry tomatoes. They do really well when you terrace them along a bamboo trellis and it just holds the plants together and lets them just waterfall over the bamboo so it makes it easy for you to harvest their fruit. In my garden I've already started to quarantine in areas where I want to start planting my spring tomatoes. In the left back section of my main patch I've already added all my fertilizer and all my compost in that area and I'll be planting that space out in that early August period. So today I'm going to be starting my three varieties of tomatoes. I'm going to be starting Daychia, Thunder and Arundino and I'll be starting my Paras and my Sugarinos over the next week. Now with my tomatoes I grow a number of plantings throughout the season. I like to get started early now in early mid-July because I like to beat the fruit flies that turn up in our patch in about late December early January. Planting my tomatoes early allows me to get ahead of the game, harvest the fruit before the damage comes through. When it comes to punnets I like to go for a larger soil punnet. The reason for that is I actually don't like to transplant my tomatoes into a bigger container rather just grow them out straight in the punnets here for planting so a little bit more space really helps. When it comes to seed raising mixes I just use a store-bought mix though I like this variety simply because it has a lot less bark and as you can see it's quite low bark so if you can find a low bark variety it really really helps. This is my go-to variety get it from a local nursery. In addition to the seed raising mixes I like to use vermiculite to cover the seeds once they've been planted out. I like to buy a coarse variety of vermiculite although I have used a finer grit in the past but this is perfect for what I'm doing in my patch. To begin with growing my seedlings filling up the tray with the seed raising mix just using a ladle just liberally filling it up. Now at this stage now that I've filled up my trays I actually do like to wet the soil now rather than after I've planted the seeds because I'm actually anxious of dislodging the seeds when I water it later so just lightly with my hose just give it a light watering making sure the soil is quite damp. Now for my seedlings I'm going to be looking at planting 10 seedlings of dankia and 12 seedlings of thunder a lot of tomato seedlings but I've got a big family people will take tomatoes if I get extra seedlings for them so I'll be growing some for my dad some for myself and some for neighbors. The first one I'll be planting is thunder I'm just going to be adding one seed per cell and the next one I'm planting is dankia. Now that I've seeded those trays they get a covering of vermiculite I personally like to use vermiculite I find it's very lightweight and it helps the plants to germinate but you can use soil if you like but in my context vermiculite is the way to go and to apply the vermiculite it's just a light coating across the tray and then once I've spread out the vermiculite just lightly pat it down with my hand. So I just finished planting out those punnets and you can see they're completely covered with vermiculite they're good to go I don't water now anymore that's it the water the water added to the soil earlier on was enough and that would eventually seep into the vermiculite and wet those seedlings. Now I take my seed trays indoors into my north-facing room and I'll be putting these onto the heat mat to aid in germination. Okay it's starting to warm up here a little bit in Sydney I am finding tomatoes germinating in my garden at the moment so I'm not expecting that they're going to need too much heat and I'm expecting these to germinate in about seven to ten days at which point I will start bringing them outdoors for them to sit in the sun and make sure they don't get leggy which is really important to get them out early in the sun as soon as they germinate. I need to now go and seed my ox hearts and do the same process seeds in each tray and then cover it with vermiculite and they will also go indoors onto the heat mat. Moving on from my tomatoes I'm going to give you an update on my other spring seedlings that have been growing out for the last three weeks and if just out here at the moment sunning in the backyard are my capsicums and eggplant seedlings. Up this end here I've got my Harley capsicum seedlings, got my eggplants, monocasa, got my agostini seedlings over there and on the end here I've got my jalapeno seedlings, Jedi. Now at this stage the most important part about raising seedlings is to make sure that they are out in full sun as soon as they germinate. Now I find that's the best way to combat any legginess issues. If you don't do that in my experience I find you lose your whole crop there's no real comeback from it. I always put out in full sun as you can see here and I leave them in there for at least five six hours of daylight at least a day and to make sure they get that sun and it just really helps to green them up and make them grow strong. Now I had to keep these seedlings still on the heat pad during the day because not all the seeds had germinated but in about three or four days time I won't use that heat pad anymore and I'll just put them outside in the sun. I do bring my seedlings in in the evenings to keep them warm the heat in the house is warm enough to keep them going but also to stop the slugs and snails get into them. I have a habit of getting to my seedlings if I leave them out of here overnight. Now as the seeds are grown in standard store-bought seed raising mix there is actually no fertilizer in the soil so the plants once they germinate they do need to be applied with additional fertilizer. So at this stage at this size I start applying liquid fertilizer once a week to really help them grow and I'll show you what I'm using how I do that. Now in terms of liquid fertilizer that you should use it's got to be something with high nitrogen these seedlings need a lot of nitrogen at this stage to grow. I personally like to use power feed but I'm happy to use anything with a high level of nitrogen that eight to ten percent. And now with the fertilizer I mix it a weak solution in a watering can and what I've been doing is just applying the water to the tray and the idea is is to bottom water those seedlings. I'm trying to reduce the amount of disturbances I do to the seedlings themselves. Just with the watering can I'm just going to start filling up the tray and have the punnets soak in that water. Just to bring in closer I filled up the the tray to about a third of the way up the punnet as you can just see right there and the solution is quite weak. I don't want to go too much in terms of fertilizer at this stage. Now these tray these punnets will sit in this solution for about 15 minutes and really let that water soak into the cells themselves and that's I do apply this once a week I do apply fertilizer once a week. On other days I will want to just water the seedlings I'll just water them in the same method but without the fertilizer. This afternoon I'm over at the north facing side of my garden and it's time for me to plant out my parsley patch. Now I barely do plant parsley I usually go get it from my parents but made the call this spot that I had earmarked for a while is going to be my new parsley patch. I've just quickly dug over this bed and added a bag of cow manure just to build up the organic matter in this soil and in addition to this I want to increase the nitrogen content of this bed I'm going to add just a half a scoop of blood and bone really get that nitrogen levels up here high because when you're growing herbs like parsley the more nitrogen the better. I'm going to slightly spread this around the bed and then I'll just mix it in to the topsoil and start getting ready to plant my seeds. Now my family grows a lot of parsley we make tabbouleh out of it all through the summer and so we grow large patches of it because we will make multiple salads during the week so my patch here is going to be quite large it's in the order of about 800 wide by about 1.2 meters long so I'm going to get a lot of parsley in this patch. Seeds dad's growing his own seeds and he's thankfully saved them for me I'll just show he's giving me to me in a bit of a bit of a tissue which is fine but this is if you can see that fresh seeds so I will be planting these and they should germinate quite well these were from last year's parsley patch. So traditionally when we come to planting our patch we would broadcast the seeds across the whole bed and as the plants are growing larger and we do our first cut a lot of those excess plants will die and it'll start giving you separations between the seedlings. I'm going to go a bit different this year I'm actually going to be planting mine in rows to try to minimize the competition from each of the plants and I'm going to plant the rows lightly so what I have done is I've after I've dug over the plant the bed and added my amendments I've added little trenches in the beds at that 20 centimeter spaces using the back of my rake and now that's ready to plant I've got in the order of about eight to ten rows in the bed now. Now if I bring it in closely you can see the the trench has been drilled all the way across the bed and I'll be planting my seeds in between these. I'm planting my seeds what I'll be doing is finally setting the seeds within the trench really being really light with the paw it's actually quite hard with seeds this small but I don't want to over fill the trench and then what I'll do with my fingers just slightly bring the soil back just gently bring the soil back to cover those seeds and then gently pattern it with my hand so to make sure there's proper contact between the soil and the seeds. Now is a good time to plant your parsley. Parsley planted before the shortest day of the year will bolt by the time spring comes along it responds to the increasing daylight and will bolt but if you a little trick is if you plant it after the shortest day of the year you'll find that your plant your patch won't bolt as rapidly actually won't bolt till next year but that's from our experience my dad and me over the years. Parsley takes a long time to germinate more than 14 days but you'll find that if you're planting around this time in middle winter it may take even longer it will probably take up to three weeks until I start seeing germination in this batch. What I'll have to do in the meanwhile is make sure I keep it protected from the birds and the ants that will have a tendency to eat the seeds and make sure to keep it well watered and I should fingers crossed have a fully germinated patch. During the ground season I'll make sure it's well watered. Parsley love a lot of water and a lot of fertilizer so I'll be giving them liquid fertilizer after each harvest and I'll be expecting to harvest this this patch I'll be aiming to harvest it fortnightly once every two weeks and I should be able to harvest it from now till hopefully September next year. Now to water the seeds in I like to add a bed sheet and actually double this up and I lay it across the bed and the idea is is to water onto this I find that the water can be just without the cover the water can be too strong and it will dislodge the seeds so put a sheet down double it up and then gently water into onto the sheet and this will slow down the water and it will just slowly soak into the bed. This is a technique I use on all my leafy greens and all my salad greens my rocket my coriander and now my parsley also use this technique on my radishes I find it works really well as well for any seeds that are really really small and that you plant a quantity of I find this is the best way to water them in. Now that's watered I'll leave the leave the sheet on this for the next at least next seven days really there to protect the seed bed from birds and ants and I'll continue watering on this sheet and watering these these seeds and as you can see that sheet is going to protect the seed bed so no insects can get to it if you pull back you can see that the water has gone through and watered that patch and as I'm expecting these seeds to start germinating about day 14 about seven days in I'll remove the cloth and I'll wait and I'll monitor when those seeds will start germinating and once they start germinating start applying more water and maybe a bit of fertilizer after that first week of growth. So thank you very much everyone for joining me this video I really appreciate the support if you have any questions please feel free to reach out to me either as a comment on this video or via my socials TikTok and Instagram. Thanks again for watching and I hope to see you in the next one.