Next it’s the turn of the Grow Pots to be sown with tomato seeds. Described as ‘Original Biodegradable Fyba’. Fyba anyone ? Gardening is rich in ‘new to me’ words !
Wonder What The 'J' Stands For ?
My pots are 6cm in size. According to the label I should be using the 8 or 9 cm pots for tomato seeds but these were given and gratefully received so I’m going to use them and see what happens (and they are a similar size to the expanded pellets).
The idea behind biodegradable pots (and pellets) is that the seedlings will not need transplanting but can be potted on complete. (More detail on this in a future post).
10 seeds. 10 Grow pots. I fill each pot with John Innes seed compost, stopping short of the rim by 1cm and then place a tomato seed at the centre of each pot. (I am going to be watering these by standing them in water so I am not anticipating losing the seed as I did with the pellet.)
I leave the pots in the water until I can see beads of moisture come through on the top of the compost. This took about 15 minutes. I wasn’t convinced I could trust my eyes to know exactly what I was looking for so I also double checked by touching the top of the compost to make sure the water had absorbed through to the top.
One Seed Per Grow Pot
I then sprinkle a layer of each pot with Vermiculite and gently, so as not to displace it, spritz the Vermiculite with water to moisten it.
When it came to labelling the individual pots as there were only two varieties it seemed easier to put a small clear plastic stick (cut from a supermarket plastic veg tray ) into 5 of one kind and leave the other 5 unmarked. It was. What wasn’t so easy was 5 minutes later remembering which variety had the marker in and which didn’t!
Yep. There’s a reason that clearly labelling is a drum banged over and over by gardeners!! No short cuts from now on!
Do you use Grow Pots for growing your tomato seeds in? Would you recommend them to other tomato growers?
