It appears that I'm about to run myself out of the shop bathroom and the kitchen. There are somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 plants now. I'll pot another 120 or so as soon as I see true leaves. I think I've got about sixty plants in Solo cups like the red ones to the right (these three are new old stock that I found up behind the coffee filters), and about 200 or so still in flats. I'm going to get some camera batteries tomorrow after work so that I can do better than these janky cell phone shots.

I've been using this old cake container from Harp's for about five years. It does a great job with the Jiffy-7 peat pellets, too. The Fireworks tomatoes were coming up at vastly different rates and the earliest were hard pressed 'gainst the top of the trays, so I moved them into the cake dome for a few days and put them on the heated floor overnight and up under the lights during the day. Seemed to help. Ten of them are now in "pots" on the shelf in the bathroom -- being bottom watered in the same cake dome lid that they were under yesterday. The cake dome is an overachiever. The shot to the lower left here is the same batch of seedlings up on the shelf after a shuffle to keep the seedlings growing straight. They're so heliocentric at this stage that they lean over about thirty degrees in about three hours. Excellent design feature.

I'm having no problems with damping off so far; I've been doing the same bottom watering trick I've used for the last few years with the  Rubbermaid totes. I also use the inner pan from my shop kitchen sink to do the same thing. I've noticed that if I never top water the young tomato plants, I get very few that suffer damping off. None lost this year, so far, but I also load up the potting soil with perlite so that it can't get moldy on top as easily. Since I drill holes in the bottom of the cheap Target Solo cups (18oz) that fit perfectly in my trays, bottom watering them by putting about a quart of water in the Rubbermaid totes and letting them soak for an hour or so works great. The cups in these pictures to the right have been around for about five years. I'm sure I don't have a penny a year in them. If they get too much UV they develop tiny cracks and have to be discarded. All the more reason to actually BUILD the greenhouse.

 This angle shows a gob of seedlings that I can't remember the specifics of in order, so I'll just post the shot with my ramblings adjacent -- shocking, right?. Half of the Bhut Jolokia peppers that were supposed to take a month to germinate are about an inch tall already, the Biggie Chiles are doing best of all the plants so far, the Habaneros, Florida High Bush eggplants, the Socrates X3 bell peppers, the Red Caribbean, Sweet Cayennes, and California Wonders are all ahead of schedule, too. Only the Ancho 101s are worrying me so far -- four or five of them have peeked through the soil, though, so I might be able to tease them out with heat and humidity. The Lemon Boy and Bradley tomatoes are doing well, but are such a pain in the (insert body part name here) to move that I'm going to wait until I see true leaves on them to lift them from their cells. Like nuns, tomatoes fret not within their narrow cells...

This is the best shot I could manage of the Jalapeno M, Bradley, Heinz, and Lemon Boys that I had to pot because they were just too tall to leave in the flats. There are a few of them that I potted today still in the bathroom, but I'll move them out in the morning before I head to work. I took this shot after baseball tryouts today -- which turned into about a three-hour ordeal. Gotta love baseball season...

I'll post better pictures in the next few days. The Biggie Chiles in particular deserve a few closeups. I figure I'll see the first true leaves in about three days.