When you tell someone that your seedlings need stakes, the first thing you hear is that you’ve sown them too early. But, for me, staking my seedlings is actually the sign that I did something right and that this year, if we don’t get blight, we’ll have lots of tomatoes.

Living in the northwestern part of Croatia means that our climate is full of extremes. We have perfect conditions for growing tomatoes in summer, but the spring and autumn are just too cold for them, so we need fast-growing and early grown tomato plants if we want to see a second tomato harvest.

Over the years the situation has changed a lot, and this also changed my seedling growing schedule. I used to grow my tomatoes on the first days of March, but after a couple of bad years, in which I had no tomatoes and very small seedlings, I decided to change this. I need seedlings that are ready to flower as soon as I transplant them, so that the flowers can avoid late June heat and that the first fruits are harvested around the middle of July. This way the plants will have time to make new fruits until September. I’m not counting on my tomatoes after September 15th, the weather change after this date is drastic, and if the frost doesn’t kill my plants the rain surely will.

This is why I started my tomatoes in the first week of January. The tomatoes sown in January are now ready for their first small stakes. 

I use the apple-pruned suckers for this job. They all get tied to the small stake and I leave them to grow in the crate altogether. I do this to prevent them from breaking. The plants could go without stakes, just holding each other, but March and April here are very windy, and I don’t want to risk it.

Although some of the plants already look huge, there are actually a lot more plants that are normal size for this time of the year. I have around 80 seedlings right now, and I’ll see how many I’ll have in the end.

80 seedlings is actually a small number for my garden, especially since I’ve grown around 200 usually, but that’s all I have for now. This leads me to the second reason why I’ve started growing my tomatoes so early: seeds.

The store-bought seeds are turning into a real nightmare here. The quality is getting worse every single year, and right now I can’t count on any store-bought tomato seeds. The situation with other seeds is similar and the germination of the store-bought seeds gets worse every year. Usually, the bags would say germination rate 98% and we’d get maybe 50% success, but lately, the bags say that the rate is 70%, and you can only imagine how many seeds we actually manage to grow into plants.

The 80 seedlings I have are actually all from the small bags of seeds I’ve bought from a small private nursery that sells seeds. I have maybe 10 plants from the big bags of store-bought seeds.

The perfect example is the later sown containers. I’ve sown a mix of seeds in the middle of February. I’ve taken a bunch of seeds from each store-bought bag and mixed them together and sown them in 3 separate containers. None germinated, not a single plant showed. They were all grown in the same conditions and same soil as the January ones. I did the same thing in March. I’ve sown a bunch of mixed seeds again, only this time I’ve sown so many seeds that the container looked like I was sowing microgreens, and I actually got some seedlings. But knowing the number of seeds in the containers, the result is very poor.

This is why I started sowing in January, if I don’t get any seedlings in January, I can always try in February or March. They can’t all be dead seeds. But you can only imagine what would happen if I’d waited for March to start sowing.

The situation with other seeds is similar, but I’ve already adapted to it. I’ve started buying only small private nursery pepper seeds and only professional cucumber seeds. They are much more expensive, but at least I know they will grow. There are now some professional seed companies that sell smaller packages in our stores, and their seeds are actually good. Of course, you pay per seed, and the price is much higher than the hobby bags of seeds, but at least I know I’ll grow something.

When it comes to flower seeds, I buy large amounts of bags to be certain to have something, and lately, I’m buying more and more bulbs, at least they will grow flowers. For example this year I bought 7 bags of tagetes, to be sure to have at least 10-15 plants for my garden.

The only good seeds that are in stores right now are beans and peas. They actually germinate in over 95% of the cases and you can be sure you’ll get the right amount of plants. I can actually sow them in separate containers knowing that I’ll get a plant in each container. Sowing peppers, tomatoes, and flowers in separate containers is starting to be useless. I end up with dozens of small empty containers. But the peas are actually good. I’ve sown my sugar peas to separate containers to plant them more easily, and almost all of them are out.

I’m waiting for my peas to grow to transplant some of the early grown seedlings like tatsoi and chard, which will go to the same bed. Also, as soon as I get a delivery of soil, I will start transplanting my brassicas. Some, like cabbages, will go to the main garden, and others like leafy kale, collard, and broccoli will be grown in plastic juice containers. I have a bunch of them at home, so we’ll try to use them instead of throwing them away. 

Also, my seedlings are back in fruit crates this week. The weather change that came on Thursday should bring the low morning temperatures back, so I decided to pack all my seedlings and have them ready for indoor bringing. Peppers are already back in the shelf greenhouse, and the rest will go indoors as soon as morning temperatures drop under 2°C(35°F), except for the tomatoes which are already going indoors every evening. They are too big for the greenhouse, so if the daily temperature drop under 6°C(42°F) they will have to spend the day in the dark. 

Hopefully, this won’t happen and the temperature won’t drop too low in the next couple of days.