Transplanting the white currant tomato

I suspect for a lot of us, home vegetable gardens mean tomatoes. When my sister and I were kids and my parents didn’t have as much time to spend in the garden as they do now, they still put in a bunch of tomato plants every year. These super sweet cherry tomatoes and juicy beefsteaks were my first lesson in how much better food tastes when it’s properly ripened and fresh off the plant. After all those summers of waiting for the tomatoes to ripen and breathing in the spicy smell of the leaves, there’s no way I could have a garden without tomatoes. Of course, tomatoes are big plants, and our balcony is small. There are a couple of possible solutions here. The first is to only grow determinate varieties of tomato – these tomatoes grow on smaller, bushier plants and the fruit tends to ripen all at once. Of course, that would require researching our plants – and that’s too much work for me. Instead, we’ve opted to go for smaller tomato varieties, like the white currant tomato. These tomatoes are tiny, so their ripening time isn’t that long, and super sweet, so we love eating them. Strictly speaking, they are indeterminate plants, which means the plants can get huge, but it also means that the fruit will keep coming.

We started some white currant seeds in late March with the cucumbers and herb pellets, but only one of the seeds actually germinated – we’re pretty sure it’s because the pellets weren’t warm enough. Tomato seeds like temperatures around 24 C to germinate, but ours were close to a window, and left uncovered pretty early, since the cucumber seedlings needed more space. Still, the one that germinated has been doing okay. It’s suffered a little since it really should  have been transplanted a week ago, but as we’d run out of compost, it’s been stuck in its tiny pellet.

It’s now in a big wooden Canada Dry crate that we found two years ago. We lined it with the plastic car liner we got at Fiesta Gardens to protect the car from our bag of compost. This serves the dual purpose of preventing our potting mix from spilling out (with a few holes punched for drainage, of course) and keeping any unwanted chemicals from leaching out of the box and into our plant. Fruit plants are the best choice for growing in suspect containers (I mean, obviously non-suspect containers are best, but those can get expensive, and I’m cheap) as they’ll generally take up the least amount of anything weird. Or so I’ve read. One thing to keep in mind with transplanting tomatoes is that you should always plant them deep enough that the soil touches the first true leaves (the ones that actually look like tomato leaves). Tomato stems have a remarkable ability to put out roots, so planting them this deep will result in a stronger root system. We also threw in some lettuce seeds to see if we can get a quick second crop – with our tiny balcony, it’s in our best interest to cram things in to try and maximize our crop, and lettuces won’t take up enough nutrients or space to strangle the tomato.

My parents are still growing a bunch of tomatoes – I’m hoping to persuade them to do a guest post at some point – so we’ll grab an extra seedling from them to have our usual two tomatoes for the summer.