Thursday, May 22, 2008

The importance of chosing the right kind of seeds


The first thing you need to do if you want to grow a giant pumpkin is to buy seeds from giant pumpkins. Simple as that, some of this wisdom also applies to indoorvegetable gardening, but in our case we need to look for "suitable for containers" or "miniature" on the envelope (note that the last term is relative, a miniature redwood is still as big as an ordinary pine). To be honest I'm quite generous on myself in this case, still I say it's an rule worth following.

Take a close look at the photo above and you'll realise why. My tomatoes hails from commersially grown plants - as you may recall I got the seeds from an sustainably grown tomato from the mall. In commersial gardening tall plants are good, in most cases you have good greenhouses and an army of persons willing to climb ladders during the harvest. Indoors in a normal flat the same qualities turns out to be troublesome. I'm lucky to have a 'two story' room, since my plants are about 150cm (five feet) tall both of them.

So I'm sad to tell you this, my dear plants, but you won't be the parents for future indoor tomatoes. My next round of plants will be 'Tiny Tim'.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I think the hard thing about choosing plants that grow well in containers is that only hybrid are readily identified as able to be container grown. If you are looking at heirloom seeds they don't come with instructions so you can of have to guess. Well that and check out the gardening forums.

When we started our container garden we got all hybrid "container" varieties and only the carrots successfully sprouted. After that I checked "Bountiful Container" out from the library and made some semi-educated guesses when I purchased heirloom varieties. I don't know how well they will all thrive in containers but at least they sprouted!