Growing Food: Hilling Tomatoes

Hilling tomatoes? Surely that's a typo. Everyone knows you hill potatoes, not tomatoes!

Except I do actually kind of hill my tomatoes. The seedlings, anyway.

Lemme 'splain.

I plant my tomato seeds all together in big containers, preferably the big plastic containers that salad greens come in. When they come up in the big containers, they will get somewhat floppy as they grow above the level of the soil.

This is when most people would re-pot them into separate containers. I, however, avoid extra steps whenever possible. I prefer to plant them outside when they're still quite small, using the milk jugs to get them going strong even at that smaller stage.

But before they're big enough to put outside, there are still those somewhat floppy tomato seedlings in the bathroom.

My solution to this is to leave some room at the top of the container for adding extra potting soil as needed. 

Tomato plants, you see, have these little hair-looking things all along their stems that will grow into new roots if they are covered. So when I cover the tiny plants right up to the first leaves, I'm actually giving the plant a more-numerous network of roots. 

Adding soil, in-progress. You can see all the extra room above those seedlings I haven't covered yet on the left. After all the soil is on, I'll water it and press it down around the plants a little.

And of course, I don't have to find individual pots. Or the space for individual pots inside under the lights.

I'll probably add at least two layers of soil before the plants are big enough to put out in their milk jugs. But I won't re-pot them, because I will have hilled them instead.

Some might call this lazy gardening. I prefer to use the word efficient. It's so much more positive.

Whatever you call it, it works for me.