In May, I would have told you that the addition of lights to our seed-starting setup means that we need to move our starting date forward a couple of weeks. Since I started them at my usual time, the seedlings spent nearly two months inside and ended up leggy and yellowing despite having been potted up from their flats. We planted the tomatoes into the garden prematurely and had to bury the stems very deep to make up for their stunting. Still, the poor things lingered and frowned at me for two weeks before they started to grow.

But when they started to grow, they started to grow. And, look, a tommy-toe tomato that will likely ripen up this week, three weeks earlier than in previous years.

So maybe the headstart was worth it? Only the final yield and the plants' reaction to our inevitable round of blight will decide.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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