Potting Up Tomatoes and Peppers

I started my tomato and pepper seeds several months ago.  They sprouted well, but in these tiny cells they stalled out after they sprouted and were struggling to make much progress.  I decided it was time to give them a little more room to grow so I went about the task of re-potting them into larger pots.  Most of what I had were three inch pots, so those took the majority of the peppers and about half of the tomatoes.  The rest of the tomatoes had the good fortune of going directly into a handful of four inch pots that I had.

 I choose to put my two varieties of paste tomatoes into the larger pots hoping to give them a nice head start on the season.  One variety was San Marzano and I grew them from seeds that I saved from a tomato that I was given last year.  The tomato was huge and had nice thick flesh, but only had eight seeds in the whole fruit.  I planted every single seed, but only five made it to this point.  If the plants do well for me I will be saving seeds from those as well so I can share them with others.  I like to make tomato sauce and those nice thick fleshed tomatoes will make the process much easier since I won't have so many seeds to strain out.  The other variety of paste tomato that I am trying this year is an Amish Paste Tomato.  I haven't seen how big these ones are, but I always like to try a variety of plants to see what grows well for me in my soil.  The other two varieties are Black Vernissage and Moskvich.  The Black Vernissage were bonus seeds that came with my seed order this year and are supposed to make medium sized fruits that will add good flavor to sauces.  The Moskvich variety is supposed to be a fast growing, somewhat cold tolerant variety that I have been saving seeds from for several years.  They make a baseball sized red fruit that is great for slicing and salads and they seem to have fewer problems than some of the other varieties I have grown in the past.

I am growing the same varieties of peppers that I grew last year mostly because the seeds I had were getting old and I wanted to use them up.  They are all bell peppers of various colors.  Canary Bell is a yellow variety, Horizon Bell is an orange variety, Purple Beauty is a purple variety and Jupiter is a red variety that grows very large in the right conditions.  The yellow and orange peppers didn't do well for me last year, but I got an earlier start on planting them this year so I hope to see a difference in their production.

There are only a few more weeks until the weather will be nice enough to plant everything outside.  I hope these guys can make better progress now that they have more room to grow.