The surplus trap

This year, we decided to go all in on tomatoes. We bought five varieties, filled several repurposed plastic containers with special seedling soil and stuck 10-12 seeds of each variety in each container.

We did not intend to grow a total of more than 50 tomato plants. What we intended was to be on the safe side in case some seeds didn’t sprout. Well, guess what — they all did.

Growing plants is a tough job and it’s number one rule is “Only the strongest survive”. In our case, this would mean selecting only the biggest and strongest seedlings and moving them to their final pots before they are moved into the ground.

Only we have a problem with that. We can’t kill a plant we’ve grown from seed intentionally. Which presents us with a quandary. Because we don’t have the water resources for 50+ tomato plants.

We also don’t have enough pots because there are ten tiny dahlias that will need a pot each in a couple of weeks, too, and there will be, hopefully, some carnations and asters coming out of the seeds soon, too, all needing their own pots for the next month or so until they are ready to take up permanent residence in the garden.

Now, could we have avoided the problem by sowing the exact number of seeds we wanted? Of course not. If we’d done that, probably none of the seeds would have sprouted because that’s how life works. But we did sow surplus seeds and now we have surplus seedlings.

One easy solution would be to give them away to the neighbours. But that might be tricky because one neighbour already said she’s not doing tomatoes this year because last year all her plants died of some fatal illness and she doesn’t want to risk it again. We can relate. We decided to give broccoli a miss this year after last year’s stinkbug apocalypse.

The other neighbours we’re close with don’t really have the space or the water for tomatoes and saddling them with our surplus plants would be kind of in bad taste. Not that we won’t ask, of course. We will.

We could phrase it as a thank you for the dozen strawberry plants they gave us from their surplus stock — but we asked for them. We hadn’t thought about this particular aspect of country life — placing your extra seedlings with potentially unwilling people. (Vlad for scale, of course, and not because he inserted himself into the frame and we thought it was cute.)

Theoretically, we could sell the surplus, after nurturing it until commercial readiness, meaning it’s ready to go into the ground. Every spring there’s a couple of trucks by the road to the city that sell tomato and cucumber seedlings.

The problem with this is that neither Cris nor Irina have the time or, admittedly, the inclination to sit by the road for hours selling seedlings. And it would be a total of 25, provided all grow well. Not worth the effort but opening up a potentially gratifying if not very lucrative business opportunity for the future.

For now, we are trying to resign ourselves to the possibility of having to grow a lot more tomatoes than planned. And buying yogurt every day. Yogurt pots are the best seedling pots.