This year's experiment with the early sowing of tomato seeds has been a great success.

Background: I always buy a couple of the earliest tomato plants to arrive in stores here, which generally arrive around the first weekend in February, and pot them up into large pots I can carry outside in sunny weather and carry back indoors to avoid freezing cold nights. These plants tend to arrive in stores the week before I would be sowing my own tomato seeds, which normally is on Super Bowl Sunday, and they generally provide us with our first ripe tomatoes before the end of April. I've always said that I'd have to start seeds on November 1st to get homegrown plants large enough to bloom in early February and provide a harvest before the end of April. This year I decided to see if seeds started November 1st would give us plants in bloom by early April.

Results so far: We have a lot of tomato plants sitting on a light shelf in the spare bedroom. I've potted them up once already and am getting to pot them up into larger cups again, probably tomorrow or Monday. They haven't been outdoors at all yet because our winter fire season has been too busy for me to start a schedule of hardening them off to outdoor sunshine and wind. Because they've only grown under artificial light, they're getting a bit leggy and I really need to work on getting them outdoors beginning this week. However, they are big and green and happy and healthy, and the first one of them to bloom was a Traveler 76. It bloomed on Thursday. I thumped those blossoms to help ensure we'd get fruit set.

In the meantime, the early plants arrived at stores in mid-January, which isn't unheard of here, but is not common either. So, I bought one of them in a very large pot, already in bloom. It dropped the blossoms that were on it when it was purchased as they had not set fruit, but the next cluster of flowers to blossom did form fruit. We now have two small tomatoes on that plant, which is growing indoors in a sunny South-facing window. The smaller tomato is marble-sized and the larger one is about the size of a walnut. So, while the fruit on the purchased plants are ahead of any fruit that will form on my early, home-grown plants, it isn't too far ahead.

I've always preferred to just buy a handful of the earliest plants instead of raising my own because I felt like it would be too hard to keep an eye on seedlings during the busy holiday season. And I feel like I was right about that. The early tomato plants started from seed indoors have not had much attention at all, especially in that busy Thanksgiving-to-Christmas time frame, but they have survived and thrived anyway. Often, when I did give the attention it was because they desperately needed to be watered on a day when I was gone all day and came home to find them wilting.

To be clear, I didn't start all my seeds this early, but I started quite a lot early, figuring that this warm winter might be a year in which I'll be able to plant early. I started the rest of my tomato seeds and all my pepper seeds a week or two back. I'm pleased with how well the plants have done, but doubt I'll start a lot of tomato plants this early every year. Maybe just a handful. Just watering and potting up a few flats of plants can be enormously time-consuming and on bad wildfire days I can have a ridiculously limited amount of time.....like, in order to water the tomato plants, I have to get up early or stay up late, and I hate missing out on sleep. This week's wildfires have tested my ability to take care of everything at home and still make it to all the fire calls. The plants, dogs, cats and chickens all feel neglected and are grumpy about it too.

I'm going to water those tomato plants this morning, thump any blossoms, and then head out to restock our supply of bottled water, Gatorade and pre-packaged snacks for our firefighters. Getting all the supplies (the nearest Sam's Club in any direction is an hour one-way) and restocking the station kitchen will be at least a half-day job. I'd rather be home planting onions, but need to prepare for the next round of wildfires. I'm just hoping that the next round doesn't begin today!

Anyway, that's the tomato report. I'm just happy we have baby fruit and, if all goes as it usually does, we'll have our first tomatoes sometime in April. And, yes, eating tomatoes from your own plants in April is worth the work involved in carrying plants outside and inside and trying to keep them watered, even on days when free time is nonexistent.

Dawn