How To Start Tomato Seeds - part 4

Seed progress: All the seeds have germinated and are about 1-2 inches tall. This is the easiest and hardest time when it comes to raising tomatoes. Easiest? Because if you have everything set up correctly you don't really have to do anything for a while. Just make sure they don't dry out and are getting the correct amount of light. My lights have are plugged into a timer that comes on at 5am and turns off at 10pm. That's 16 hours of light a day. They need a good 12 to 16 hours a day to gather the light needed to grow. They also need the 8 hours of dark to grow. It's during the dark that they actually grow. Gather the light during the day - turn it into growth during the night.

I know you are wondering why this would also be considered the hardest time as well? Simple - You have to resist the urge to do anything to the plants. That means no fertilizer, over watering, touching, moving, playing with and fawning over these little things. LEAVE THEM ALONE UNTIL THEY HAVE THEIR FIRST TRUE LEAVES. I'll show you what I mean:If you look at the leaves on these plants you'll notice the shapes. Two of them are long and plain, while others are small and have a strange shape with scallops and lobes...in short...they look like tomato leaves. The larger ones in the picture are not true leaves - they are cotyledons - it's part of the seed and give the plant the ability to photosynthesize light until the first true leaves are formed. They eventually shrivel up as the plant gets larger. My general rule of thumb is to do nothing but make sure the plants have water and light until the true leaves are larger than the cotyledons.