Personally I prefer to have my transplants be a little bigger than those appear to be. 6-8" tall is the ideal. So I'd wait a bit longer for the in ground ones.

Dave

If I'm going to wait a bit longer, should I go ahead pot them up? If so, I was thinking of just using deeper newspaper pots, but I do have 3" or 4" square plastic pots that I could use. Thanks for your help!

Even if you wait before transplanting, or potting, you could begin hardening off now. Seedlings can grow indoors or outdoors, you just have to properly acclimatize them to outdoor conditions.

No frost date has come and gone. Looks like the lowest temp in the 10 day forecast is 55 degrees. It does tend to be very windy here, so that is a concern I have regarding their size.

You could do either. This might be a good opportunity to experiment.

I would pot up all of them anyway into at least plastic SOLO cups mostly because the newspaper pots will dry up super quickly when you go to harden them off outdoors anyway. They can go from soggy to dry enough for plants to wilt within hours on a sunny day with wind.

You could plant some out now (after hardening off) and keep growing some until they reach 6-8" and plant them out later, then compare how they do.

My experience has been that, if the weather is warm, plants put out small grow really quickly and do very well. If I were in a very high disease pressure area like the south, I might be more hesitant to plant them out early and expose them sooner to lots of disease organisms, but where I am, I've planted out tomatoes that size when I needed to replace older plants, and they caught up to much larger, much older plants very quickly and, at the end of the growing season, there was negligible difference in production.

yffermwrhoosier: It does tend to be very windy here, so that is a concern I have regarding their size.

Even with small plants, you should plant deeply. And plants that low to the ground are not that likely to break in the wind. And they'll grow stronger and sturdier when exposed to wind early.

The big thing to watch out for with smaller seedlings isn't so much wind but certain pests, especially cutworms, flea beetles, and slugs. Cutworms can be warded off with collars and other tricks, but slugs and flea beetles are much harder to control. If you're seeing a lot of slugs in your garden now or have a flea beetle problem at the moment, I'd wait a bit until the plants get more robust and can withstand the damage better. Both slugs and flea beetles are just aesthetic annoyances for larger plants but can put a serious burden on smaller ones and set them back significantly or even kill them.

Thanks for your suggestions, gorbelly! I do enjoy a good experiment. And especially thank you for the head's up on the drying situation with the newspaper pots. I hadn't considered that and I think you just saved me a lot of watering.

Haven't seen much in the way of slugs or flea beetles, but this is the first week in a month that it stopped raining and I've only just been able to plant anything other than containers.

Still, given the experimental parameters, probably worth giving it a shot.

True about newspaper pots drying out fast, but it's easy to prevent that. Just place them in a tray with half an inch of water. They won't dry out. As fast as the paper wicks water away from the soil, it'll wick it up from the tray. That's a lot easier than potting up, and gentler on the plants. Now, the paper pots will eventually degrade, but you should get several days of hardening in before they do.

If you're not planning to plant out for a few weeks then, sure, pot up. As noted, for small plants the wind won't be a serious issue. They'll grow a lot faster planted out at temps of 55+ than in little pots.

My experience is not in line with Gorbelly's and your smaller plants are much behind schedule for your zone, especially for varieties you are growing. I would suggest that you proceed with your experiment but go out and purchase a few dozen plants that are ready for immediate planting. I've been selling some plants with ripening fruit which gives those plant buyers a 10-12 week advantage over your transitioning plants. In 12 weeks your neighbors will be flooding you with their surplus tomatoes. Fruits harvested within the coming weeks have much more value.

If you're not growing for market, a delay in getting fruit isn't necessarily a big deal. If you are growing for market, then obviously the calculations change a lot, and getting the earliest fruit is key.

Last year, I didn't get plants in the ground until the second week of June or so, and half of them were tiny and under 4". I still got enough tomatoes that I was starting to get tired of dealing with them, and the progress of the plants did not differ between plants of the same exact variety that were started weeks earlier vs. weeks later.

If bragging rights to ripe 4th of July fruit is important, then it's true that those plants definitely won't do. But I don't grow in a high tunnel or season extending setup, so I find that even planted early, I don't get 4th of July tomatoes. The plants tend to sit around and not do all that much in the cooler temps if I plant out earlier.

The growing season is plenty long enough where I am personally to get plenty of tomatoes for personal enjoyment, even from late varieties, from plants the size of yours right now. Things may be different where you are, yffermwrhoosier. But the folks at Sandhill Preservation, who are, I believe, in a similar area climate-wise (they're in Calamus, IA 5b) and they report:

"Ideally, we start our tomatoes in mid-April to set out in late May. Lately, our tomatoes have been started in early May and set out in mid-June. I've noticed we have virtually no early blight problems and, if properly cared for, have lots of tomatoes."

The reason Glenn Downs plants tomatoes later is because he is busy hatching and mailing chicks and also seeds thru April. He is very preoccupied in the Spring. If that's where the money is......

The point is not why he does it, although Glenn Drowns does say that he has less disease when he plants out later.

The point is that one can do it that late and still get plenty of tomatoes in an area very similar to yffermwrhoosier's location.

Personally, I think the advice to purchase some more mature plants is a good one that the yffermwrhoosier will be happy with when tomato envy sets in as others start harvesting a bit earlier. But barring freak acts of nature, he or she should still get plenty of tomatoes with the plants s/he has now.

This is, of course, assuming s/he's not growing to sell the tomatoes, which, as I said, brings in a whole different set of considerations.

I had a big mold problem with news paper pots when i started. plastic FTW

Yeah, paper grows mold like crazy. But I haven't personally known the mold that seems to like paper to harm live plant seedlings.

Thanks for the info everyone. I'm not growing for market, so no problem there for me. And I did go ahead and procure some plants from local nurseries/generous neighbors which I got in the ground last week. I knew that the ones I started would be late but I figured it was worth a shot to just to see if I could get anything to grow. My growing season ends early-mid October usually (though last year it was mid-November before we got any frost to speak of, truly bizarre), so I should have time for them to produce yet. Thank you for the info on Sandhill Preservation and your experience with planting late last year, Gorbelly! I really appreciate you looking into someone in the same zone as me.

I did worry about mold with the newspaper pots, but so far I haven't had any trouble with it (which has surprised me, but I've tried to maintain good air movement and stuck to bottom watering).

I've decided to do a 3-way experiment: start hardening off 2 of each variety immediately, potting up 1 of each into a plastic cup, while keeping the other in its newspaper pot. Meanwhile, I'll pot up the rest and keep them back under the lights for a few more weeks (there's a 2nd tray of seedlings not pictured). I wasn't really planning to keep more than 1 per variety for actual production but now I'm curious about how they'll turn out. Now where to put them...