Take a few of your seeds and place them on a small 4" x 4" moisten paper towel or coffee filter, fold it in half and place it in a ziplock bag. Check each day for germination and upon seeing the root emerge from the seed place it into the planting mix/soil just below the surface.

How old are the seeds that you sowed? What level was the seed in the mix. i.e. just below the surface? What type of mix/soil were you using.

Hopefully you will see that seed become an established plant.

George

This is so simple. I had 2 Everglades tomatoes split on me, so rather that waste them, I squeezed them on to a layer of dirt in a small pot, then cover them with a thin layer of more dirt. In about a week, I had a herd of seedlings. After a few days, I used a pencil to pry up the seedlings and remove them one by one and plant them into cells. Seeds don't get any fresher than right from the tomato.

In my experience tomato germinates fairly quickly when the soil temperature is right. They don't seem to require extra warmth as much as pepper or eggplant, so I don't bother with heat mat or anything like that with tomatoes.

Have you been keeping the starting mix moist? If your seeds are more than 3 or 4 years old, they may not be viable anymore. You said you sowed them a couple weeks ago, can you be more specific? 1 week with no germination might not mean anything but 2 weeks is a long time for tomatoes.

Well go figure, my first seedling just sprouted. :) Still waiting for 4 others though.

The seeds are a less than a year old. I sowed them about 10-12 days ago just below the surface and have been keeping the mix moist. Thanks for your tips, I might just start over from scratch. Just wanted to know if there's any hope for my current seeds.

"If your seeds are more than 3 or 4 years old, they may not be viable anymore."

I've not seen that to be the case unless the seeds got wet or were in extremely hot conditions such as left in a hot car in the summer time.

I plant tomato seeds all the time that are more than 5 years old and still get near 100% germination on them. If you go so far as to store the seed packs in a jar with a little desicant gel, germinating 10 year old seeds will still get pretty high germination rates. If they are stored in paper envelopes at room temperature, they usually do well even at 6-7 years old unless the humidity is very high. (Storing them in the open in the kitchen when you do lots of cooking that emits steam is not a very good idea.)

I've found that when I don't get a decent germination, it's usually because of something I did, not the age of the seeds.

Betsy

I planted 12 seeds of FloraDade about 10 days ago. Today I have 1 sprout, and it looks terrible. Sometimes you just get bad seed.