How to Grow Tomato Seeds

Growing tomato plants can be done indoors or out. One of the advantages to growing tomatoes indoors is that you can start planting long before the last frost. This will give you tomatoes much earlier. All you need to grow these plants inside are a few pots, soil, and sunshine.

Things You'll Need
Pots
Potting compost
Tomato seeds

Instructions

1. Prepare your pots. Make sure they are clean and ready to be used. If you have used the pots before for other plants, soak them in a 1 part bleach and 9 parts water solution for 10 minutes and rinse.

2. Fill the pots with potting compost. You can also use equal parts peat and sharp sand to start the tomatoes in.

3. Place the tomato seeds 1 inch apart from each other. You can place as many seeds as you fit in a single pot as long as they are 1 inch apart.

4. Cover the seeds with a thin layer of potting compost and press it down lightly.

5. Cover the top with a piece of plastic or cardboard to hold heat and moisture in and place the pot in a warm room. A sunny window sill in a warm room is perfect.

6. Water the seeds occasionally to keep the soil a little damp. You don't want the soil to dry out but don't over water the seeds either. It will take about two weeks for the seeds to germinate.

7. Remove cover when the seedlings appear and place in a well lit area.

8. Transplant the seedlings with their leaves appear. Prepare a pot for each seedling. Gently grasp the seedling and pull upward to remove it from the soil. It should come easily. Plant the seedling in the new pot and allow to mature.

9. Transplant the tomato plants again when they have filled the second pot with roots. They should measure about 5-inches tall at this point. You can either plant the tomatoes in your garden or transfer them to their final pot. A 10-inch pot is perfect as a final pot for most tomato plants.

Source: http://www.ehow.com/how_2240032_grow-tomato-seeds.html

History of the Tomato

The tomato, that familiar fruit that we use as a vegetable, has a long and fascinating history. Once wild, it traveled around the world, only to be condemned as a poisonous berry and to be rehabilitated by time and resourceful cooks. Its horticultural status was determined by no less than the U.S. Supreme Court and it has become the epithet of choice for bad movies. Although this humble fruit began in the wild, today its thousands of variants grow in almost every country of the world.

Time Frame

The tomato is a New World plant that can be traced back over two thousand years to Central America. It began cultivation as a crop before the fifteenth century when it was transported to Europe as a decorative vine and edible fruit.

Geography

Wild tomatoes grow to this day in the middle elevations of the tropical Andes mountains in South America. Researchers believe that the origin of the wild plants was in Central America and that they were carried south in trade by native peoples. Spanish explorers brought the plants back to Spain and traded them around the Mediterranean, most notably to the Italians who appear to have distributed them widely in Europe and, finally, to England where they were carried by colonists back to the New World and planted in colonial gardens along the East Coast of North America.

Function

Wild tomatoes bear insignificant clusters of yellow-white flowers followed by small, reddish-pink fruit. Native peoples of South American Indians and Italians, who grew tomatoes for food, cultivated plants with larger fruit. When the tomato emerged as a food, the varieties known as "heirloom" were developed, mainly in Germany and the United States. Today, the fruit's use as an ornamental is limited and hundreds of specialized hybrids are grown for sauces, soups, stews and just plain eating.

History

The tomato's progress from wild vine to popular fruit was not easy. A member of the same family as the potato and deadly nightshade, its relation to nightshade convinced many that it was poisonous. The courageous Italians and Spanish used the tomato as food to their---and the world's---culinary benefit. By the middle of the 18th century, most Europeans had discovered that the little "pome dei Moro" (Spanish), "pomme d'amour" (French) or "poma d'oro" (Italian) was tasty and versatile. The French introduced it in their colony at New Orleans and Thomas Jefferson grew tomatoes at Monticello. The tender vine was still viewed as poisonous by the less worldly inhabitants of New England who grew it as an annual ornamental. As legend has it, the myth of the poisonous fruit was finally dispelled in 1820 by one Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson who proposed to eat a bushel of tomatoes on the steps of the Boston courthouse. The crowd that turned out to watch him die in agony was no doubt disappointed. Recipes for tomatoes flooded cookbooks thereafter and by 1880, the myth was an "old wives' tale." Today, thousands of acres in hundreds of countries grow the tomato, providing a source of vitamins C and A. Research has also established that the lycopene in tomatoes may help fight certain cancers.

Misconceptions

Botanically, the tomato is a fruit---it flowers and contains seeds. An American, however, added to the mythology by attempting to have the tomato classified as such to avoid the tariff on imported vegetables. The U.S. Supreme Court, in Nix v. Hedden (1893), officially ruled the fruit a vegetable---leading to confusion that persists to this day.

Source: http://www.ehow.com/about_4574477_history-tomato.html