Im in the same boat as u -- I am so surprised at how fast my plants have sprouted -- I dont even have my garden spot chosen yet (lol) so I have really got to get on the ball.

good luck
Melissia

Scott,

Can you move them to a cooler location? The warmer their location, the faster they grow. You can slow them down by keeping them cool and also by not fertilizing. If you deliberately withhold fertilizer until they are in the ground, they won't get as big as quickly either.

As far as not fitting under the shop lights, can you put some of them in a sunny window? A sheltered, partly shady spot where they can get sun part of the day and shade the rest of the day? It is hard to slow them down once they get going, but it is not impossible if you can manipulate their conditions a little. Of course, commercial growers use a growth regulator to keep them short, but we home gardeners don't have that option (and I probably wouldn't use it even if I had it).

Are your shop lights adjustable? I can raise and lower mine so that they are as low as 2" from each shelf and as high as about 12" above the shelves. When I start my seeds, I keep the lights so close they are almost touching the soil....and the plants as they sprout. Once the plants are growing, I can slow down the plant growth by keeping the lights down low and close to the plant. For example, if the plants are 3" tall, then the lights are only about 1/2" above the plants. That keeps the plants shorter longer. If I raise the lights to where they are 2" above the plants, the plants almost immediately zoom up that two inches to be closer to the lights. Thus, by keeping the lights almost touching the plants, I keep the plants shorter longer.

Because it is rapidly approaching the time when I can plant them into the ground here in southern OK, I am now carrying them outside for about 6 hours a day and they are almost giddy with the excitement of receiving that many hours of real sunlight every day. At this point they are about to outgrow the light shelf anyway, so pretty soon I will just start leaving them on the screened-in porch at night. They may get a little chilly at night, and that will slow them down a little, but that's OK at this stage.

Our soil is only in the upper 50s and our nights are still close to freezing most nights, so I can't plant them out unless I use Wall-O-Waters, but it won't be long now.....

And, we have all kinds of tomato plants in our Lowe's, Home Depot and Wal-Mart. All are fairly healthy, but I never think that commercially-raised plants look as healthy as those grown at home. Their color always seems kind of "off" and sometimes they already have foliar disease issues even though they are not very old or very large, and have been grown in controlled conditions. Sometimes the earliest plants in the stores don't look as good as those that arrive later too.

I always grow way too many tomato transplants, but I love the luxury of having back-up plants in case my garden gets hit by a surprise storm....sleet, snow, hail, etc. I usually end up giving away a lot of the extra plants, but I always hang on to some backups until very late in the season.

Some of the backup tomato plants will eventually go into the ground in oddball places where I let them grow away to their heart's content. They will be in semi-shaded out-of-the-way areas where they produce a decent amount of foliage but not fruit. I use them as 'trap plants' for the tomato hornworms. When I find a hornworm in the veggie garden, I transfer it to the trap plants where it can eat and grow to its heart's content. That way, I get to enjoy the sphinx moths later in the season without losing valuable tomato-producing plants to the voracious appetite of the hornworm caterpillars.

Melissia,

Nothing helps you select a garden spot more quickly than having plants just begging to be planted in the ground!

It is great that everyone's transplants are breezing along. Now if only the weather would stabilize at the warmer end of the scale so we could get busy planting!

Dawn

I have a large east-facing sunroom that is mostly windows. All but the south side windows are low-e so they keep it as cool as possible, but the room will still get to 70 degrees if it is sunny and 40 degrees outside.

Right now the windows get my current seeds waiting germination and the shelves get the plants. From the bottom (of pot) of my oldest plants, they are now over 12" tall, but still stocky. I moved the lights up a link every couple of days when they started to touch until I had to resort to increasing the distance between shelves today after re-potting. Most of this I picked up on this site. It has worked too well!

I plan to put these 1-gallon pots outdoors most of the time, but it is still getting to the mid-30s before I get home some evenings, so I'm a little scared about leaving them out. I just planted too many I think.

I can't kill hornworms either unless I am feeding them to fish, so I just pick a plant that is past production and move them there. I leave these plants just for the worms. When I was a kid, an elderly neighbor had a huge tomato garden that he let me search for worms. I did it for free and was grateful.

Scott,

I'm really glad your plants are doing "too well" because, you know, it beats having plants that are not doing well at all. : )

There is someone on the Tomato Forum (and I can't remember his name) who lives in zone 5 or 6 and he starts his plants as early as we do, or even earlier, even though he can't plant out until late May at the earliest. One year he posted pictures of his tomato plants (they were STILL inside under lights) and they had to have been 2' tall! It blew my mind. I couldn't handle trying to keep plants of that size inside.

If the weather turns really cold really late, like it did last year, and I have to carry my six early tomatoes inside (they're in 5-gallon pots) for a few nights, it drives me nuts. On the other hand, I do think it is worth the trouble, because they'll give me ripe tomatoes in April.

Dawn