How to Grow Indoor Tomatoes

Tomatoes are fresh and delicious fleshy fruits of the plant Solanum lycopersicum or tomato plant. They are common ingredients to any homemade dish and they can be heartily eaten when ripe just like any fruit. 

 

Wouldn't it be better to eat freshly-picked tomatoes than store-bought ones? Fortunately, tomatoes are very easy to grow. It has even recently become a trend to grow tomatoes indoors that college students were planting in their dorm rooms. 

 

If you want to start your simple home/urban garden, plating even a single tomato plant is a good choice because it can produce lots of fruit. Here are simple ways of growing your indoor tomatoes:

 

Sowing the Tomato Seeds

First off, you need to decide which variety of tomato you will grow. If you are looking for a variety of tomato that will bear a lot of fruit and ripen quickly, choose a plum or cherry tomato. After acquiring some seeds, either bought or gotten from a tomato you've recently consumed, you need to make your starting mix. Seed trays are needed for germination but if none are available, you can use egg cartons with little the compartments. Fill with potting soil, and then wet with water until moist. Poke holes into the soil and place about 3 seeds in each hole then cover with soil. To facilitate germination, cover the starting mix but water every day. Once it has sprouted, move it into a well-lit location like a window with much sunlight and discard cover.

 

Transplanting the Tomato Sprouts

Once your sprouted plants have developed more than two sets of leaves, you can now transplant them into a new pot that can support them as mature plants. Acquire a 5-10 gallon container and fill with pot soil. Remove seedlings from the small containers carefully without breaking the roots. Plant these seedlings into the new container and water generously every day. Make sure that they receive enough light from either sunlight or artificial lighting (around 8 hours a day). After two weeks, to support efficient fruit production, you can apply a fertilizer rich in Phosphorus.

 

Supporting, Pollinating and Harvesting

After a month, when your plants start to grow tall, you need to start giving them support to carry their weight. You can loosely tie the main stem such as a wooden stick every 8 inches. In terms of pollination, when they are grown outside, this is done by bees, insects, and wind but indoors, you need to mimic this by lightly shaking the main stem with the fingers or directly a fan towards it. After sixty to eighty days, you can now harvest your fruits and enjoy your home-grown tomatoes.