There is such a method of growing winter tomatoes, when, after harvesting, in the fall, the fruits are placed entirely in the ground to a depth of thirty centimeters. Then everything is covered with natural insulation made of straw or branches.
Of course, it’s good to prepare for the new season at the end of the previous one.
But the seedlings still lack heat, and the first shoots appear somewhere at the very end of spring.
I have my own secrets for planting winter crops, which I will discuss below.
Empirically, I came to the conclusion that hybrids are not suitable for this, it is necessary to take only varietal tomatoes.
I leave the seed fruits until October – by this time they will completely “reach”, that is, they will ripen.
Naturally, careful selection is necessary – there should be no damage on the tomatoes, only healthy specimens are suitable for our purposes.
I plant them in flower pots filled with dry humus.
I immerse the tomatoes five centimeters deep.
And that’s it, I don’t do any more manipulations.
I take the pots to the greenhouse and leave them until frost.
When cold weather sets in, I build insulation from boxes with which I cover pots and old blankets or coats thrown over them.
The secret to planting whole fruits is that the seeds don’t germinate right away.
By the middle of spring, I dismantle the cocoons from blankets and boxes, pierce the humus, and pour warm water over it to start the process.
A couple of weeks later I see bunches of seedlings in every pot. Of course, there is a dependence on the ambient temperature and seedlings, so it is impossible to predict the exact timing of the start of the process.
Then I follow all the usual procedures – I dive seedlings and transplant bushes from pots into a greenhouse.
As a result, everything grows much faster than the same seedlings, which are usually bred in the spring and kept on the windowsills for a long time.
And the color of the seedlings pleases – they are bright, juicy, and not painfully pale.
By the way, these bushes are also much more viable.
