Gather supplies for transplanting tomato plants into cups
Twenty days have passed and the time has come for transplanting these tomato plants into cups. Supplies needed for this project will be clean cups to put them into, potting soil, and trays to hold them when we are finished. We can use the two trays pictured above. However, several more will be needed as there will be a lot of plants. You can also use a pencil or chopstick (or your fingers if you find it easier) to help separate the roots of each plant. We re-use our cups so they are cleaned in bleach water to remove any pathogens that might be present from the prior year. Below is a link to where you can purchase these cups, if desired. One 1020 garden trays holds thirty two cups.
Separate tomato plant roots and remove it from the tray
Gently holding onto the stem of a tomato plant, carefully separate its roots and remove it from the tray. You can use whatever tool works best for this part. You might find it is easiest just to use your fingers.
Place the plant in cup and fill with soil; Add enough water to keep roots moist
After you have gently separated the roots and removed the tomato plant, place it in an individual cup with a little soil in the bottom and fill in around it. How much soil you put in the bottom depends on how long the stem is. If it has a long stem, you may find you don’t need any in the bottom. In this case, the plant will rest on the bottom of the cup and soil can just be filled in around it. Make sure to pack in plenty of soil to completely surround the plant and tap down to make good contact all around it. Water the plant with a watering can, making sure not to get the leaves damp. You will need enough water to make sure the roots are moist, but not so much you drown the plant.
The plant may look a little droopy at this point due to transplant shock. However, it should snap out of it pretty quickly. Don’t get discouraged if you lose a plant because that does happen sometimes. However, most of them do just fine.
Put the tomato plants back in a holding tray and place them back under your light source.
The newly transplanted seedlings need time to recover from transplant shock. You should give them at least a week under grow lights and in a controlled environment before attempting to harden them outside. I will cover the hardening process in a future post, but for now they just need more time under the lights to recover and continue growing.
Conclusion
We ended up with around three hundred tomato plants from our two original trays. There are a few more Roma plants than Rutgers, but both varieties did well. Overall, this takes a little time but is a fairly simple process. It is possible to skip this step altogether if you start your seeds directly into individual cups. For us, that would not work as well because we would need to put a few seeds into each cup. Once they were thinned out we would end up wasting a lot of seed. However, if a person only needs a few tomato plants that would work very well.
You would also not need to use 1020 gardening trays and the same type of cup we use. Styrofoam cups with holes poked in the bottom for drainage and tubs to hold them in would work just fine. Creativity can save people money, although artificial lights do seem to be one thing that work much better than a sunny window, at least for us. Thank you for reading this post, and we will check back soon with the next step. It won’t be long before our plants are happily growing outside in the ground!
