If they are damping off, that's a fungal disease that tends to make the stem thin out and die. I don't think that is what you're seeing since you don't mention a thinning of the stem.

If the stems are purple but otherwise healthy, then that generally is a sign the seedlings are young and are not yet adequately taking up nutrients. This can even occur because the nighttime temperatures are too cool for proper uptake of nutrients. It generally self-corrects once the plants are in the ground and actively growing. So, at this point, I'd consider the purplish tone to the stems to just be a sign of immaturity. If it doesn't clear up after a couple of weeks of the plants being in the ground, you might need to give them some phosphorus....which, if you're growing organically could mean using liquid fish or liquid seaweed fertilizer, or any water-soluble general purpose fertilizer or tomato fertilizer if you want to use a synthetic product. Normally, though, purple stems on tomato plants clear up as the weather warms up and the plants just outgrow the issue.

Okay...so maybe the stem is thinning. I'm really afraid of infecting my entire tomato bed if these are sick. Can the fungus that cause damping be fixed? It seems that I read somewhere that it cannot. It makes me sad thinking that these plants aren't going to make it, but I would rather purchase a few more tomato plants than risk making everything sick by planting unhealthy plants.

The truth is...I have not practiced the best plant hygiene in the past month or so. There are flying gnat things and aphids (or something similar) and inconsistent watering going on with the plants who are waiting indoors.

I managed to clear up the bell pepper plants from the aphid things. Planted them today and it looks like some of them might be fixin' to bloom even.

But...the gnats moved to the little jalapeno and banana peppers now. They're not quite ready to go outside.

Anyway...I guess the real question is: If these tomatoes are damping off and I decide to plant them, will they infect everything in the bed?

If they are damping off, they should be dead within a few days and you won't want to transplant them into the garden. Damping off progresses and spreads quickly so if that is what you have, don't plant those plants in the garden because they're going to die anyway. I'd put the plants outdoors but not too close to the garden plants. See how they do outdoors for a week. If they have damping off, they should be dead by the end of the week. If they are suffering from something else that is not damping off, they will survive a week outdoors and be ready to do into the ground.

The disease is in the potting soil. Damping off is a name collectively given to a group of fungal diseases that all kill the plants in the same way. So, yes, if the plants actually have damping off, the disease is in the sterile soil-less medium in which they are growing and you can transfer it to the garden by planting those tomato plants.

Sometimes if damping-off is caught incredibly early, you can save the plants but that is rare. Damping off is encouraged by keeping the growing medium too wet, and the situation is aggravated by poor air flow. Sometimes you can halt it in its tracks by sprinkling cinnamon on the surface of the growing medium, or by watering the plants only with chamomile tea, but usually once you can see damping off, the plants are too sick and aren't going to survive.

I'm sort of surprised you have been keeping plants inside this late in the year. I moved even my tiniest peppers outdoors in early April, where they have been growing on slowly but steadily, whether they are in the ground or still sitting in a flat waiting for a bare spot of ground to open up for them. As long as the plants are indoors and are not getting sunlight, they are going to grow very slowly. Even the best light indoors is nowhere near strong enough for good growth, so the sooner you get plants out into the sun, the better. Sometimes there is a tendency on the part of the gardener to overprotect small plants, but what they really need is just a chance to be out in the garden growing in the best conditions available.

Well, the plan wasn't to keep them indoors for so long. May is a crazy busy month for me--contests, competitions, concerts, award ceremonies, graduations, graduations parties, end-of-year programs...for both my kids and my school kids. I'm often gone from the house all day and also in the evening.

I did try to get them hardened off maybe 3 weeks ago (was that when it was very windy and rainy?) But the trays were blowing off the porch, which is the only "safe" place I have to leave them as it provides some sort of wind block and shade, but not entirely. I killed a tray of plants back in late March/early April--they got too much sun and too much wind. I wasn't home to move them around to shady spots and all. And more recently, I rushed the pepper plants into the garden and lost half of them--they had that sun scorched look to them, which is why I started more peppers indoors that are now being attached by indoor pests.

I left the tomato plants on the front porch this morning--threw away three of them because they were really sick looking. I'll see how these do and in a week or so see what happens. I'll bring them in at night to avoid the slug...although maybe slugs don't like sick plants.

I really don't need a lot of tomato plants because I won't have a place to "process" them as I thought I would. The kitchen will be torn out in a couple of weeks and processing food in a house under remodeling doesn't sound possible or at least very difficult and stressful. Maybe I can take the food to the church kitchen to prepare. Anyway...a new kitchen will be nice when it's all finished.

Thanks. :)

Hardening off in your car...there is a thought! But I need more info on this. Do you take them to work with you and leave the windows cracked?--that's actually a possibility...OR I could just take them to work and put them outside and step out and move them around to shady spots until they're ready for full sun. Thanks for the idea. :)

Hazel, You need a gardener to get you through the May busy season. I tell my husband that sometimes "I need a gardener" and he just says "you are the gardener". (grin)

Maybe before next year y'all can build a cold frame you could use to harden off plants. A cold frame that's tall enough would block the wind and you could prop it open with a stick so that the plants don't roast inside of it on hot days. Back when I was a kid, greenhouses were less common, but every gardener had a home-made cold frame and one of its main purposes was to harden off seedlings.

A new kitchen will be nice, and once it is done, then next year maybe you'll be able to process tomatoes to your heart's content. I wouldn't want to be trying to do a lot of food processing while the kitchen was torn up either.

Sometimes when I get behind on canning, I just wash freshly harvested tomatoes, throw them into ziplock bags, and toss them in the deep freeze. I keep adding to the current ziplock bag until it is full. Once it is full, I start a new bag. Later on, when I have lots of time, I thaw and process those tomatoes at my convenience. They can be used for cooking or I can use them in various canning recipes. It took me too long to figure out ways to make canning work for me so that I am able to get it done without totally becoming a slave to it. I still would rather do all the canning as soon as the tomatoes come into the house, but sometimes there's just not enough hours in the day.

Kim, Spring is hard enough as it is without hail wrecking things. No matter how hard I try, I still feel like a dog chasing its tail every Spring. There's never enough hours in the day, and I go outside every day with a mental "to do" list. I come back inside at the end of the day with shockingly little progress made on the to do list some days, regardless of how hard I worked. It just seems like the things that need to be done far outstrip the number of hours available in which to do them.

It never fails....I am meandering through Spring lost in a garden maze filled with tons of chores and, suddenly, without me having any idea how it happened, I'm looking at our small weekly newspaper and realizing 'the kids are graduating from school this week!" and I have no idea how that happened. It seems like it was Spring Break one minute ago and now school is out? It sneaks up on me every year. Thankfully, we no longer have a child in school or I'd be trying frantically to do everything at home and also do the whole year-end school activity type of stuff. I miss those days, but not enough to wish them back again. When Chris was still in school, my garden was a more manageable size and was more in scale with the time I had available to do the garden work. It was when he went off to college and the house was so quiet that I really began spending every waking minute outdoors.

Dawn

Yes! I need a cold frame. And a gardener...but I'm a bit of a control freak and want to do it myself so maybe that wouldn't work. BUT...maybe someone who could dig out the bermuda grass for me. That would be nice.

I'm on a forum with a tomato breeder who uses a vehicle for hardening off. I think it's a truck, so the cab gets newbies and the bed gets bigger plants. I don't know if the truck runs, but wouldn't it be nice to pull it in the garage on a cold night or before a thunderstorm? One guy took his plants to Florida with him. That's dedication. I think there was a pic of flats sitting on the roof of the vehicle soaking up Florida sun.

Yes they went everywhere with me. For 2 weeks I carried them in the back end of suv. I opened upper part of door and parked with rear facing east. I eventually parked with the plants getting full sun and wind and then put them out. Would not want to do this every year but it worked for me this year really well.

It's Saturday and I made this post last Sunday. The tomatoes are still alive. They don't look great but they're about 12 inches tall and don't look completely horrible either. I gave them a shot of fish emulsion a few days ago. And they've been outside on the front porch since then. (I guess the slug didn't like tomatoes.)If they were damping, they would be dead by now, right?

In other news, most of my indoor plants are planted outside now! Except the teeny tiny jalapeno and banana pepper plants. I just need that cabbage to finish up so I can clear out that bed. When should cabbage be finished--how big should their head (is that what you call it?) be?

Yes, if they were damping off they probably would be dead by now.

With the cabbage, the ultimate size depends on what is normal for whatever variety you planted. There are varieties that form 6" heads and there are varieties that form heads that are 12" or larger. Do you remember the name of the variety you planted? If you do, you can Google it and see what the average DTM is and that's a clue as well.

I plant a red variety that finishes up early, and those were harvested maybe 2-3 weeks ago, and I plant a green variety that takes another 2-4 weeks to mature and some of those are about full-sized now and some of them still have another week or two to go. You can harvest your cabbage heads at whatever size you like and use them. I tend to harvest them smaller (and, hence, more tender) for fresh eating, cooking and cole slaw and let them get a bit larger if they're going to be used for sauerkraut.

I am glad you said that Dawn. I have been wanting to eat one of my little red ones but wasn't sure if it would be "ready "

Kim, With virtually any leafy crop you grow, you can harvest it and use it at any stage you choose, so there's no reason to wait for months for everything to reach full size.

I do the same thing with onions---harvesting and using them at any and evey size along the way. Because I planted so many this year (I don't remember exactly how many but my greatly overpacked Dixondale bundles of plants were huge), I've been especially diligent about harvesting early and often and using those onions every step along the way. Would we get a bigger harvest overall if we let everything get full-sized before harvesting and using it? Of course we would, but by harvesting and using various things in the early stages as the so-called and trendy "baby vegetables", we get to eat them for many more months than we would if we waited for everything to fully mature.

I not only want for us to be eating from our garden in June-Novemberor December , but want for us to be eating fresh food from our garden as well in March, April and May. After all, what is a family of 3 going to do with 700 or more onions all harvested at the same time? You can't eat that many after full maturity before they start to go bad. So, it is a great compromise to eat as many as possible all along the way....and even though I use a lot of fresh onions in cooking and many in canning, we still will harvest more full-sized onions that we can eat fresh before they spoil and I still will have to chop and freeze a lot of them. I take that approach with everything, including cabbage. I always plant too much cabbage and a lot of it ends up being made into freezer slaw or sauerkraut precisely because you can only eat so much fresh or cooked cabbage before it goes bad. Harvesting young tender heads and eating them along the way helps us avoid having a huge cabbage glut all at one time.

Probably I just need to learn to stop growing enough to feed an entire army.

Dawn

45 day cabbage...just some plants I picked up that were an impulse purchase 'cause I had never grown cabbage. The info I found online said "softball" sized heads and we're about there now. Yay! I can pull those out (once I figure out how to harvest them) and plant all these peppers now. And spray them with a fungicide. SIgh.

Harvesting is not hard. As early as it is in the year, your heads should feel firm and solid. Later on, as it heats up, sometimes they get looser and not so firm and solid.

I just cut off the head at the base of the plant with a large kitchen knife or a small machete. After that, you can pull the remainder of the plant out of the ground. You also can pull the whole thing out of the ground by the roots (or dig it if it is too deeply rooted to pull) and then slice off the head. I prefer removing the head by slicing it first. When I pull up the whole thing by the roots, it throws a lot of soil up onto the cabbage head. That's not so much of a problem with most cabbages, but if you grow one with a more savoyed or ruffled sort of head, a lot of dirt can get flung into the outer leaves.

Last year for fun I left a few cabbage plants and they kept making baby heads. I won't be doing that this year prime real estate needed to replant. The 3 broccoli between the cabbages have been giving baby shoots for awhile. They quit and started back after that cool spell. I get about a cupful every other day. When I pull the cabbage out they will have to go.

I'm more prone to leave overwintered cabbage stalks to make baby heads in the late winter after I've harvested the cabbage, or sometimes in very early spring. At this time of the year, I don't leave the cabbage plants to make little heads because it is too risky to tie up prime real estate for something like cabbage that may not do well in our summer heat. (It just depends on how hot the summer is.)

Hazel, I have something similar going on with some of my peppers. The peppers were all started at the same time (in March). All were in the green house, all potted up to solo cups the same day. The ones I've put in the ground are tall and blooming. I have one of the same variety that is 4" tall and one a foot tall. Several have thinning (or girdled?) Stems. They won't stand up straight. Pretty sure I used the same potting soil on all of them. It's something Worley's Nursery mixes and sells as their own mix. The only thing I can figure is they were on a shelf that didn't get enough sun and if thats the case, probably poor airflow. These are not new seedlings, they are 2 months old. I am bummed, I have to go see if I can find a pablano start, because all of my pablanos are effected. I am watching the paprika starts, they look better than the others. I think the cayenne all died, which surprises me, they are normaly very sturdy.

Amy, I'm sorry about your peppers. I'm having all sorts of stunted plants this year. Lots and lots of mushrooms/toadstools coming up in my raised beds too.

Those tomatoes I thought were damping off almost 2 weeks ago are still alive on my front porch. I guess they aren't "damping" so they really, really need to be planted. They don't look great, but they're alive...and slowly growing. If they were damping, they would surely be dead by now.

I'm just trying to figure out a time that I can get them planted. I don't have space in the raised beds, so I'll have to dig up an area in the big garden area and put them at ground level. I have so much to do. And it's supposed to rain all next week. I thought of putting them in our flower bed in the front yard. LOL It's mostly empty 'cause we never got around to planting it as we knew we were putting in new windows and didn't want stuff trampled. It MIGHT be too shady for tomatoes though.

How shady? I've had tomatoes produce fairly well in a situation where they got direct sun from sunrise until about 1 pm and then very little sunlight after that. They didn't produce as heavily as the plants in full sun, but they did produce.

Alternately, you could put them in containers, or grow them directly in bags of soil-less mix or,even better, of Black Kow composted cow manure. There's more than one way to skin a cat, and more than one way to grow tomato plants too. Look at the link below to see some plants grown directly in Black Kow.

How To Grow Tomato Plants in Bags of Black Kow Manure