Sorry Steve but your pics are a good example of why window sill growing just can't cut it. ;) They are more than a "tad" leggy, they are a lot leggy.

Re-potting them deeply is the solution and burying all that excess stem. You can even lightly coil all that stem around down in the cup if necessary. But it would only be a temporary fix as they will just stretch again to get more light since they clearly aren't getting enough.

But since you "don't want to re-pot them and you don't want to deal with the lack of light problem then the only suggestion I can make is to rig up some sort of miniature Florida weave rig for them. But those fragile stems could be easily damaged by even string much less twisty ties and sticks.

Those on the box in your pic that were just re-potted - all that cup and all dirt for those tiny little plants sitting right at the top? You could have planted them 1/3 or 1/2 way up the cup and then filled it as they grew for better results.

Dave

Ok, point made...Let's just imagine that I have a 4 year old and a 2 year old who insist on messing with everything & getting into everything. Let's also add that there is no possible way my wife would let me put a lighting setup in the room i'm using for my plants (which is actually my sons room that he doesn't sleep in yet). It was hard enough convincing her to let me use the room, as it is. I had to buy her a new camera. With all that in mind, obviously not wanting to wait until a week or two before last frost date to start my seeds (so they'd go outside as seedlings, right after germinating), what would you do? What did people do before they had indoor lighting setups? Well, they used the most powerful light source available to anyone, the Sun. I agree that my plants are somewhat leggy, but they are not as bad as you make it seem. Both windows are South facing. The plants are rotated daily. Also, the roots in them are already starting to reach the bottoms of the cups. Wouldn't this mean that potting them deeper into these cups would make them root bound much quicker? When I eventually do pot them up to their final homes (10 gallon pots for most), they will be buried up a few inches. This all worked fine for me last year and has worked fine before then. I simply have a handful (3 or 4) of seedlings that seem to be leaning a little bit, one of them being my fault. I could pot them up to bigger containers, but then i'd run out of sunny space (and room space) very quickly. I'm looking for an alternative to potting them up, hence this post. Why is it that I always get the meanest responses only in the Vegetable Gardening forum on here? I should have known better than to post this thread. Oh well...

- Steve

Steve,
Perhaps you could "fence" your seedlings by putting a stake on either side and stringing some very soft twine between the stakes, kind of surrounding the seedlings with loose support. The might still lean a bit, but would be more upright.
I just repotted my tomatoes from 9 cell starters to larger, deeper 6 cell containers, and they will be moved one more time before they hit the garden in April, hopefully in one quart pots.
Digdirt has a good point about planting and then filling the cup gradually. Tomato plants will form roots all along their stem if the stem is in soil.
Why does your wife object to the seedlings? It looks like you have a very tidy set-up there. You should see our guest bedroom/temporary greenhouse. At least it doesn't smell earthy (yet).

No "meanest" response was intended. Sorry you took it that way.

I understand that we all have limitations to work with but that doesn't mean we can't compensate for some of them - assuming cooperation from other family members. Doors can be closed, kids can be told to stay out period. And spouses can be expected to try to cooperate a bit. But the easiest way to compensate is to wait until the proper time to start.

If it is a room no one sleeps in but a simple 2 shelf set-up with a couple of shop lights isn't allowed for some reason then couldn't a couple simple cheap clamp on fixtures with a high energy CFL be used. Easy to put up and take down. Aluminum foil to reflect more light? Lower the room temp? Use a fan on them? All sorts of things that can help.

What did the oldtimers do? They had single pane thin glass, not double pane e-glass for one thing and most windows were 2 or 3 times the size of modern windows and their houses set out in the middle of a field with little or no shade.

obviously not wanting to wait until a week or two before last frost date to start my seeds (so they'd go outside as seedlings, right after germinating), what would you do?

I would have waited until the middle of March to start them since in your zone you can't safely plant them until May 1st at the earliest. Steve - it doesn't have to be a choice between a week or two before or 12 weeks before - there is lots of room in between. You started them way too early for your zone but that doesn't mean you have to wait until mid-April to do it either. The itch to get going to start something growing IF you have the accommodations to handle them is one thing. If you don't have the required set up then you acknowledge the problems and limitations to yourself and make yourself wait until the time is right so you can make the best use of what accommodations you do have.

Wouldn't this mean that potting them deeper into these cups would make them root bound much quicker?

No, it would just mean more roots developing from new parts of the stem. Besides, even a moderately rootbound sturdy plant can still to much better when moved to the garden that a long tall spindly plant will. You just break up the rootball a bit.

So my suggestion, for whatever it may be worth, is to re-pot those seedlings deep into a tall cup coiling the stem round and round until only the very top of the plant sticks up and the soil line is no more that 3/4 of the way up the cup. Then rig up a table lamp or a floor lamp or a clamp on lamp or 5 of them with high wattage CFLs in them for at least 16 hours a day but 24 would be better, then shut the door and cross your fingers. Otherwise wait 3 weeks till mid-March and then start over.

Dave

Steve ... would it be feasible to cut bottoms out of some of those blue cups and place over your plants as a sort of 2nd story... fill with dirt .. with kebab stick at one edge to keep the 2nd story from toppling over. Getting your 4-year old to help put the 2nd story on the plants will enlist him/her in understanding how fragile they are... the 2-year old may be too young to understand.

Oh, and re: the idea to make a "mini-cage" with two sticks and twine .... I'm sure you know that slices of nylon stockings are primo for that use ... soft and springy.... FREE!

Dave: I apologize for my abrupt (for lack of better words) response. This forum has not been good to me in the past, as you may have figured from my reply. ;-) I've been thinking about this for the past hour or so, while getting some stuff done here at work, and I think I will see if I have enough of the same size nursery containers (luckily, I got about 200 or so different sizes free from someone on craiglist late last year!). Then, I will probably pot them up. I do have a fan on them, which i'm sure is helping some. I still don't know what i'd do about the light setup though. I may shop around to try and find something very cheap & quite portable. I think that would helps things with the wife a bit, if it's easily moved out of the room when necessary.

So, I think the current plan is to find some type of bigger container to pot them up to, search for some type of light setup to help (heck, even if I just buy a few cheapie lamps & some CFL bulbs to go in them). Then, I should be good to go about the end of March when I put together my cold frame and place them outdoors in it for a few more weeks before setting loose in their final homes outside. The last frost date here in lower elevation Middle TN is April 15th to 23rd (depending upon source). I think i'll put them out in their final homes on the weekend of the 24th & 25th of April.

I guess my "fight" for the July 4th tomatoes will continue to be a hard one, but I will continue to try to keep these mater plants healthy & get them not so leggy, growing outwards & not so much upwards.

Yet again, sorry for my response above. I get "set off" kind of easily sometimes when people contradict what I have all planned out in my head. You, being one of the wisest gardening folks i've met on here, are someone I should listen to, IMO. It also doesn't help, like I said, that the wife totally does not support nor care about any of my gardening. :( Anyways, one quick question, if you still don't mind answering it for me, please. When I go shopping for whatever type of light setup, what kind of bulb do I need (I know nothing about this stuff). Are they labelled as CFL's? If I get something that takes the screw in bulbs, not the long tube ones, are the proper kinds of lights available in those sizes? Thanks again for your help.

marlin: Thanks for the compliment & for the suggestion, as its a good one that I may very well use. =)

- Steve

No problem. ;)

Check out this lamp pic available at most any hardware store or big box store and these bulbs especially the GE Soft White 60 one.

CFLs average 15 watt listed but give the equivalent of 60-75 watts. The Westinghouse 3669400 PAR30 listed at the bottom of the page is another good possibility (we use them in our outdoor motion lights).

Just a couple of examples but generally try to get the highest rated CFLs you can and put them REAL close to the plants. They don't get hot so they can be almost touching the leaves.

Hope this helps.

Dave

Steve, instead of sticking a skewer into your cup, I would put a skewer on one side and secure with some duct tape or packing tape. Then take a twisty tie, secure it to your skewer (more tape so it doesn't slide down) and then make a loop at the other end, similar to a cane. That can go around your seedling stem. I have this particular setup on a basil plant which wants to grow sideways and out of the pot (don't ask, I have no explanation).

And for what its worth, to my totally untrained and virgin eyes, I think they look okay. Any way you can put them outside at all? I've put mine under an upside down see through storage tote...not sure how cold it is there though, I'm in Texas!!!

Last but not least, and I'm almost afraid to admit this, I had a few plants get really leggy and instead of having 3 out of 40 plants in larger containers (thereby creating a logistical lighting problem for me) I repotted them in the same cup. I popped them out upside down, got rid of some of the bottom dirt without disturbing the roots much, put them back in the cup and added potting soil on top. I gained about 1.5 inches of extra depth that way. They did fine surprisingly enough :)

Sweet! I've seen both of those before, in the stores...Thanks! I'll probably go get some tomorrow. What about some type of stand to put the lights on? Any recommendations? =) If not, I can find something to put them on, as I think those lights have clips on them, or some type of fastener, right?

- Steve

i use that same light i have a large card board box with a hole in the top just smaller than the round dome i have 60 plants in it and it has a door on the end and it works killer

Yeah they have a squeeze clip/clamp on the end and the head rotates too. Lean a broom up against the wall and clamp to it or set a chair near the window and clamp to the back of it. Got an ironing board? Set it up by the window and clamp to it. Shoot hang a curtain rod across the window 1/2 way up and clamp 2 of them to it.

Necessity is the mother of invention so think WAAY outside the box man! ;)

Dave

Here are the 5 Wisconsin 55's. That's all I had enough of my new potting mix to pot up. =) They look much happier. I might have hurt one slightly, but i've had plants suffer much worse. It will be fine, especially with a few squirts of my Foliage Pro 9-3-6 water. ;) I'm headed to the store tomorrow for the lighting setup. Crappy camera phone picture...

{{gwi:20850}}

- Steve

Yes they do look much better. Is all that white stuff on top perlite?

husker raises a very good point above - a cardboard box. One of the online grow box plans uses a deep square cardboard box lined with aluminum foil on all sides, the cups set down in the box, and the lamp/light clamped to the top of the box. In that case, think INSIDE the box. ;)

Dave

Dave: I figured you'd be the first one to recognize the perlite. ;) It's a thin layer of about an inch, maybe less on the tops. I like the fact that it holds the plant in place very well. My mix for this year is perlite, a seed starting mix that contains sphagnum peat & vermiculite & lime, and a normal MG potting mix. It contains about all of Al's 5-1-1 mix ingredients except the pine bark fines. =) The plants in the pic have several layers of each, somewhat mixed together. Most of the perlite being on top. Anyways, i'm going shopping for the light setup in just a few hours...getting excited!

- Steve

Growing seedlings at a window is tough. The sun heats up the pot, and the plants don't like hot soil. You need to shade the pots with aluminum foil or cardboard. Styrofoam cups might provide enough insulation. It also helps to grow them in a bigger pot, which won't heat up as fast.

Also, the seedlings lean toward the sun. If you place a reflective surface behind the seedlings, they will get light from both directions, and they will grow straight. This can be a white shade, a white piece of cardboard, etc. This will make a world of difference. I've done this.

Make sure there's some ventilation, so the air doesn't get superheated where the plants are.

Hi Steve,
I start my tomato plants inside from January to February and as you have found out, the plants will get rather leggy if they don't have sufficient light. I learned that too from growing a lot of stuff in the windows. The sunlight up here in Kansas just isn't strong enough yet. But, one thing that helps is to lower the temperature in the room once the plants have germinated. I don't know if you can or not, but maybe you could close the heat registers in the room? This will lower the temperature and the plants won't grow so fast. In fact, it is recommended that after tomatoes and peppers germinate, lowering the temperature to 60-65°F is good for them. I don't know if you would be able to do this but it's just a thought. Like everyone else said, you can definitely plant the seedlings deeper and they will come out of it just fine. I've done it tons of times. Good luck! Keep telling your wife how much you enjoy gardening and how important it is to you. Sometimes people don't mean to, but they don't understand things that aren't important to them but are to us. ;o) Hope I'm not coming across as impertinent. Just trying to help a fellow veggie enthusiast.

Well, y'all, I have some good news & some bad news.

The bad news is that 2 out of the 5 plants pictured above that I transplanted last night are dead as a doornail. This is one of the reasons why I normally don't pot them up at this stage. I like them to form a somewhat firm root ball first. That way, when I transplant them, 2/3 of the potting mix doesn't fall off the bottom. It was not easy to do those 5 above. I had to let that part fall off the bottom, then form the best hole that I could (only having a little bit of soil in the bottom of the new pot cuz I want to bury the plant deeper). Then, put the rest of what was in the cup, plant & all, in the new pot. One of them I broke the main stem, so I figured it for a goner, but the other one had no reason to die. =( I don't know what happened with it. This is kind of making me rethink potting the other 15 up to the 1 gallon containers. I think I may just do the 5 that are really tall/somewhat leggy & wait a week or two for the others (since I now have my good news)...

The good news is that I bought the 8.5 inch nickel colored clamp-able light fixtures Dave recommended above! =) I also got the Daylight CFL's too (75 watts, I believe). So, i'm going to get my light setup going here in a few, maybe pot up those 5 plants, then go from there (depending upon how tired I am after that...lol). Wish me luck with the next 5, maybe I won't loose any of them. The 2 I did loose are no big deal cuz I am growing wayyyyyyyyyyy too many extras this year. ;-) It just drops the count of Wisconsin 55 seedlings I have down to 3. Anyways, i'll take some pics of the lighting setup & post them later! =)

Also, thanks for the suggestions, teauteau & lilydude. I think I will close the heat vents in the room for sure. I came down here to take a break from the heat in there. It feels like a sauna with the heating mat going on the germination station, the sun blasting through the 2 windows all day & the heat having been on recently. I should go outside & plant these flower bulbs I bought for my daughter before doing more work up there as it's beautiful out today! 60 & sunny!

Later - Steve