Early Girl was the first tomato variety listed on my last post. With this variety, I am trying to have ripe tomatoes by my birthday on June 24th. Normally I don’t get ripe tomatoes until early August. I wrote an extensive post about this about 3 weeks ago.

To update their progress, the extra early tomatoes are still inside, but they have outgrown the light table.

I was hoping to have them outside by now, but the weather hasn’t cooperated and I want to construct a mini greenhouse covering to put over and around the plants once they are outside. I don’t want to put them out unprotected too early.

If you didn’t see the previous post, here is the photo montage I displayed of their life so far:

Then I put the plants back under

the lights like they were in picture 8. It wasn’t too long before they grew to this:

They had to be moved down to fit under the lights.

From there, they weren’t getting enough direct light so I moved them to the floor and moved a light down to them.

They have now begun blooming, which I had hoped wouldn’t happen until I got them outside.

Today is already April 27th. The normal safe from frost date to plant tomatoes where I live is May 15th and most people will plant them on Mother’s Day weekend on the 12th or 13th. With any luck, I will get mine outside in the next few days. I hope that’s soon enough to still get ripe tomatoes in June. Cross your fingers for me!

Original post by Marc