Hello, I'm a new(ish) gardener looking for help with what to do next in my vegetable growing process. I'm in zone 6a. In order the pictures are of my 1. green beans, 2. Summer squash, 3. Tomatoes, 4. Cucumber seedlings. They are starting to get big with some true leaves coming through. I'm wondering when/if I should thin them out? Should I attempt to pull them apart and pot up all of them? I started these all about 2 weeks ago so I'm scared they're still too fragile but they are already pretty big (for reference these are 8inch pots). Any advice/tips would be helpful!
by Secure-Vegetable-309
3 Comments
Your cucumber and squash really should have probably be directly sown into the ground. And because of how easy they grow/germinate, I would say only one to two per cell/container. The tomatoes, I regularly grow more than three in the same cell but I thin down to one or two and then plant them into the ground. Im no professional, sometimes it works for me and sometimes it doesnt.
Setting aside that you’re a little early with the cucumbers, beans and squash …
Germination rates tend to be high with all these types of veggies, so in the future you only need 1 or 2 seeds per pot. Just use more pots rather than lots of seeds in one pot.
Tomatoes are resilient. You can probably separate some of them gently and pot up. Just go slow.
Beans, it depends. If they are bush type, you can try to split them and they might come apart depending on how they rooted. If they are pole beans, just leave them all together and pot up for now. Pole beans don’t mind neighbors and will beneficially climb on each other.
The squash and cukes won’t divide well. You may just have to thin them and pot up until your weather is good enough to put them outside. Cukes will probably do ok if you train them upright but squash wants to sprawl so it’s a tough one to grow inside.
Good luck! They look like healthy starts.
If anything I would try to prick out the tomatoes into their own smaller containers. The big boys I would wait to sow until I could plant them wherever they’re gonna live (or at most 2-3 weeks before last frost date). They tend to grow quickly and readily once in soil and can overtake seedling pots quite rapidly. They also tend to be more finicky with transplanting (it’s definitely possible, but I’ve never tried it) and ultimately may not set fruit any earlier than if they were just sown directly (cold ground and transplant shock will set them back).