Tomatoes - sow in trays or straight into individual pots?

[Primrose]

Best advice always seems to be "sow your tomatoes in trays and transplant seedings into individual pots " and I wonder if there is a specific reason for this practice? I grow a couple of dozen tomato plants every year and always sow individual seeds directly into 3" pots, leaving them in these until they're big enough to plant outdoors. It seems to be an awful lot of work to keep transplanting seedlings from trays to pots and I wonder whether I'm missing something by sowing in this way?

[Beryl]

Primrose the advantage of growing in seed trays and then potting on is to pot up the seedlings right up to their seed leaves. This will encourage them to make a sturdier root system. Plants that I put out side on the lottie I pot on 3 times from seed tray to 3", 6" then the largest I can find. Then when planting they go in up to the seedleaves. I never have a problem with them falling over when they have the weight of all the fruit on later.
Well worth the time and effort.

Beryl.

[oldherbaceous]

And you can also select the strongest and best looking seedlings.

[Geoff]

I sow 2 or 3 seeds in a thimble pot, select the strongest then pot up deeply in 3" when they have grown a bit. No root disturbance this way.

[oldherbaceous]

Dear Geoff, i can't remember the last time i heard them called thimble pots.
And glad you pot them on into 60's.

[Geoff]

Thimble might not be the correct term, you would certainly have to have pretty big fingers! They come in trays of 40 pots labelled 6cm/85ml.

[Mike Vogel]

Primrose, why not combine methods? Sow in 3-inch pots but with the soil some way below the top. Then, as the seedlings grow, firm down gently and add compost up to the level of the cotyledon leaves. Repeat as the plants grow. Indeed, you could end up piling the compost up to the level of the first true leaves; this is what tends to happen when they are planted out.
I've never tried these ideas, but I don't see why they won't work.

However, a 3-inch pot will be too small for toms sown in Feb or early March for planting outside.

mike

[bunuel]

one reason that you may want to re-pot, as opposed to introducing more soil, is that I am under the impression that when you re-pot it is a good idea to lay the root horizontally in order to encourage greater root growth than would otherwise be the case.

can anyone back me up on that, or is this information bogus?

cheers,

Fraser

[Beryl]

Not heard that one before Bunuel.
Potting on has the same effect of encouraging rooth growth from the stem.

I always think of my seedlings as being my 'babies' and treat them the same way. A new baby would start off snuggled up in a cradle (or in my day they did), then a cot, a small bed before eventually to an adult size bed. Seedlings like to feel their feet (roots) cosy round the side of the pot. A good sign when to pot on is when you can just see them coming out of the bottom.

Beryl.

[bunuel]

yeah, I guess I am getting myself mixed up. It is mentioned here (http://hgic.clemson.edu/factsheets/HGIC1323.htm) that horizontal planting of tomato plants is an effective way of making plants stronger, but I guess it doesn't make too much of a difference until maybe the final planting outdoors.

I tried this last year (my first year of planting tomatoes) and was pretty successful until my entire crop was wiped out by blight. Such is life.

[oldherbaceous]

Dear Fraser, a very good link about Tomatoes.
Although the pratice would work well for larger plants, i wouldn't recommend bending the roots of seedlings, as they would be very easily damaged.

[Primrose]

Mike - I'm intrigued by the labour-saving suggestion of planting one tomato seed per pot but only partly filling the pot with compost and then adding more compost as the seedling grows. Has anybody every tried this? I can see that more roots might appear from the stem further up by using this method but wouldn't the lower roots be running out of compost as they grow and start to grow upwards into the higher level of compost? Would this not be a bad thing as when the plants finally get planted out into the border they would all be facing the wrong direction, i.e. upwards, which is not what you want them to do? I suppose that if the planting hole is big enough roots can be flattened out when planting but wonder whether this would hinder the growing process.
I must confess that often my tomato plants don't look as robust as those sold in garden centres. Perhaps my sowing/growing technique is at fault although I know my previous impatience at sowing too early in the past has been a contributing factor.