 Hello there, welcome to the channel and welcome to another evening of getting some seed started for my outdoor garden for 2023. And this is one of the more exciting ones for me because it is all about getting the tomatoes going. I think tomatoes is probably one of my favorite things to grow in the garden and it's always a big challenge to try to narrow it down to just, you know, a few varieties. And I have, I think, probably 10 or 15 different varieties in my stash of seeds and I need to try and just kind of narrow it down to, I think I'm going to go with about eight different varieties. So I'm just getting my containers ready and the containers that I will be starting my tomatoes in tonight is solo cups. So solo cups are a very affordable, cheap way of starting seeds. They make a great container that's kind of equal to like a three or four inch pot that you, you know, could buy. And what I do is I take my cups and just a very small sized drill bit with my cordless drill and drill a bunch of holes in the bottom. You can see here there's a bunch of holes in there. I can do like a half a dozen of these at a time. I got a whole stash of these now ready to plant up whatever I want to plant up. So I'm just going to start off by using my seed starting mix. It's pretty dry. I made this about a week ago just with some peat moss and perlite and moistened it with some boiling water, which is usually what I do. I'm going to have it in the house. I want to make sure I don't have any fungus gnats. So I usually moisten it with boiling water. So I'm just going to be filling these solo cups up halfway with my seed starting mix and I'll explain why in a few minutes. And as I mentioned, it's pretty dry. So it needs to be moistened up a little bit. So once I get all of these halfway filled, I've got them in a tray here that is about two inches deep. And I'm simply going to take a jug of water, put in a couple of inches in the bottom of this tray, and let these solo cups wick up all that water. So I'm just going to fill up these cups right now and talk about the variety of tomato seeds that I want to plant this year. So I kind of categorize my tomatoes into three categories, but I always try to plant a small cherry sized tomato, a variety of those, the bigger beef steak, or I'm not sure what other varieties I have here tonight, that the mortgage lifter, Manitoba, the bigger ones you can only use for slicing and sandwiches. And then I always have some kind of a Roma tomato or a paste type tomato. So I kind of have those three categories that I try to plant two or three varieties from there. And of course, then there's also the determinant and indeterminate tight tomatoes. I always try to do some of each of those. So the indeterminate ones are the ones that will require staking because they are the tomatoes that just keep growing and growing. As long as they're alive and haven't been killed off by frost or disease, indeterminate tomatoes will just keep growing and producing. And determinant are more of the bush variety, smaller plants that just grow to a certain size, produce a certain amount of fruit, and then they're done. So I like to grow the determinate ones in containers because you don't need as much trellising or staking to grow them. And save all of the indeterminate ones for my garden areas where I got some fences and trellises for them to grow up. So as far as the cherry sized tomatoes, my very favorite is the sun gold cherry. So this is a sun gold cherry. I will pop up a picture if I can find one online for you, but it is an indeterminate staking type tomato. So it will grow tall and produce lots of fruit. The other cherry types that I want to grow this year are called the pink ping pong. I grew them last year. They are a nice sized cherry, but almost as big as a golf ball size. And they are kind of a nice pink color and they were super sweet and I really enjoyed them. So I want to grow them again. And the black cherry tomato was one that I grew a couple years ago and I haven't the last couple years, but I have these seeds. And these were also really good too. They were great in salads. They were really sweet. So that's the three varieties of cherries we're going to be doing this year. As far as the bigger tomatoes, I have a mortgage lifter, a manitoba and a beef steak. And this one's a determinant, a manitoba and so is the bush beef steak. So I've got a couple of determinant varieties that I will be probably planting up in some kind of container. And this mortgage lifter is an indeterminate one, so it will have to go into my larger space with a good trellising setup. I also picked up this from TNT Seeds. It's another staking tomato that's a Roma or a paste tomato. And it is called the Mamma Mia. I never grew it before, but I think it looks like it should be a good one. Hi there. Welcome back. So the other day when I was videoing my tomato growing about five days ago now, I realized when I started editing that I developed some kind of an audio problem. So the last part of that filming didn't come through okay. But that's all right. We are five days now since I've planted those tomatoes. And I just wanted to show you now because I have them in my grow tent. So we had covered all the different varieties that I was going to be growing this year. And the one thing that I had mentioned was the method that I like to use is where you just fill the cup halfway up at first. And then plant your seeds. As you can see, we already got one that is germinating here five days later. This is one of my beef steaks. So the reason that I just fill halfway implanted is just a method that I learned on YouTube of course. And I let the tomato plants grow until they have grown up above the edge of the cup. And then I remove any leaves that are still below the lip of the cup here and fill it with some more potting soil. Now the reason for that is to help build up a really good strong root system. If you ever looked really closely at the stem of a tomato plant, you can see that there's all sorts of tiny little hairs on the stems. And if those get buried in dirt, they will turn into roots. So I find this method is a really good way of building a really good strong root system for your tomato plants before you put them out into the garden. And using these cups also I don't have to worry about potting into a bigger container before I have to move them outside. So I'm hoping that these tomatoes will be in these containers right up until they're ready to start hardening off outside and going into the garden. So I've been using that method now for a few years. It's been working really well. So I'm just having a little peek into all my cups here. I can see a few more are starting to sprout. The strawberry tomato is another one that I don't think I told you about. It is another cherry variety to pick up these seeds at a seed exchange. And apparently the tomatoes kind of look like a strawberry when they are ripened. There was one other kind of tomato that I didn't talk about and this is the white Tomasol tomato. It's a larger slicing type and it is a white color. It wasn't a very nice looking tomato because it was white. You know it just looked like it wasn't ripened properly but it had the greatest flavor. I really enjoyed them so I'm going to try growing some more of those this year. So so far the germination of my tomatoes is going great. I'm really liking using my grow tent to start my seeds this year. This is the first time I've done that. I'll give you a quick peek here at my peppers. I did a video on these about three weeks ago, I believe it was. As you can see I got a good germination rate with all my sweet peppers. And I still have my one cracky hydroponic tomato plant growing in the back. And I just picked a nice little tomato off of it right now. So I'll get to still enjoy some tomatoes waiting for those outdoor summer tomatoes to come. So I will be using potting soil rather than seed starting mixture to add to my tomato plants because they're going to be in these solo cups right up until the time they go into the garden. They're going to need some fertilizer and a little bit of food to help them grow. So stay tuned for that video coming up you know probably in the next month or so where I will be adding some soil to my solo cup tomatoes. So I hope you enjoyed my video, please hit that like button, leave a comment and don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss out on future videos coming to the channel. Thanks for watching, happy gardening.