My first Tomato

[jmsieglaff]

What a beautiful tomato! I look forward to hearing about the taste as well!

[Fred Hempel]

Excellent photos.

[GnomeGrown]

Great fruit set and photos too!

[a sunny day]

Hey Ted, re my four Moravsky Div plants that were producing tomatoes in late November last year... well they are still going strong. The hot summer didn't kill them. They had a good second flush of tomatoes quite a while after the first lot and now I'm just picking the odd tomato every couple of days. But they made it through the summer. I'd say they are semi-determinate and will definitely grow them again next season as a reliably early tomato. The taste developed as well and they were very nice.

Sakharnyi Pudovichok's are still kicking along as well. They'll definitely be on my list of early tomatoes as well... not really sweet but a really good flavour.

I experienced some problems getting my Moravsky Div seeds to germinate this spring. I planted them indoors, under lights in early January. By mid February, they had not germinated while all my other varieties were growing well. I dumped the germinating soil from the MD six cell container back into the five gallon bucket containing my seed starting soil and replanted MD with a different soil. The second time, they germinated well and grew well, but about six weeks behind my other plants.

One month after I dumped the soil containing the MD seeds back into the soil bucket, I removed the lid from the bucket and all of the MD seeds had germinated in the soil bucket. They were as thin as a couple of hairs held together, but six to eight inches tall. They were green in color from the small amount of light that filtered through an orange colored bucket in the relative dark of my shop.

I found it interesting how long the seeds took to germinate and the adverse conditions they finally germinated in.

Ted

[ddsack]

Ted, I am sometimes exasperated and flummoxed by why some seeds germinate, and some don't. Like you, I've run into the hopeless first batch sprouting very late after the second batch is up and growing too. This year I have a new one on me. I was given 46 seeds for a F2 trial, and sowed all of them in two 4 cell packs, with about 6 seeds evenly spaced in each of the 8 squares. Same day, same seed batch, same starting mix from the same bag, kept side by side in the same tray, so same temperature and conditions. One 4pk has about 18 seedlings up and growing, fairly evenly spaced in the cells, the other 4pk has zero, nada, no seedlings up at all! Go figure!