It has been over two months since I have shared my progress growing tomato plants from the sees in the hydroponics system to planting young tomato plants outside.
Here is how the journey started this year on April 15, 2025. I planted the seeds in my hydroponics system with my daughter:
Two days later the first seeds have sprouted:
Ten days from the planting on April twenty fifth we see most of the tomato plants come up in my hydroponics system:
By May 6th or less than a month later my tomato plants ran out of room to grow in my hydroponics system:
That same day I have transplanted my tomato plants from the hydroponics system into my outdoor containers:
Two weeks later on May 21st my tomato plants looked still pretty small as they were still adapting from being transplanted and the weather in Washington state was still fairly cold at around forty six degrees Fahrenheit at that time.
Fast forward about nine and a half weeks from the picture above and my tomato plants are much larger. I have been fertilizing them regularly as well as pruning them and tying them to the posts.
You can probably see that I have a dual post system going this year. This is a first time I am using shorter posts to start the plants and later adding longer thin green posts to support the higher heights of the plants.
In previous years I would always go with just the longer posts. I tried a set of big metal posts with wires in between to support my tomato plants as well as a combination of metal and thin tall posts, but neither of the systems seem to work well for me.
This year I have been tying the plants to the four foot posts until yesterday when I introduces a second set of posts that are thinner but taller. I am really curious if this system will be best in terms of supporting the heavy tomato load I normally get from my container based plants.
As you can see from the image above my only Early Girl plant has a couple tomatoes that are starting to get some red color in them. This plant seems to be weaker than the rest as you can see some of the leaves are starting to get yellow.
I wasn't particularly placing a big bet on this plant as I simply wanted some earlier tomatoes and that seems to be working out. My other early varieties such as Raspberry Luana are still green:
The second earliest variety that I normally have is the yellow tomatoes called Pork Chop:
Pork Chop is the variety that my daughter enjoys the most and she has asked me to plant more of those, but I think one of them failed to sprout so I have ended up with only two or three bushes of Pork Chop.
Pork Chop tomatoes have these unique stripes that distinguish them from the more oval yellow variety called Golden King of Siberia that I also grow.
We have a couple bushes of Golden King of Siberia tomatoes that normally produce giant yellow tomatoes with few seeds and a very meaty texture:
A later tomato variety that I really like is Brandywine which is a very large pink tomato with a great sweet flavor. Below you see two of the Brandywine bushes that I planted this year.
Here are the seed packets of the tomatoes that I planted in my hydroponics system this year:
I also picked up three bushes on a 3 plants for $15 deal in Costco which were: Early Girl, Old German and Celebrity tomato varieties. I have tried the early girl tomatoes in the past and not a huge fan of the taste, but they are the earliest home grown tomatoes for the Pacific Northwest and we need the early varieties as our summer is late and very short which makes for a very challenging tomato growing season.
That is it for now, I will post more when I start harvesting my tomato crop :)
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