Hullo, Future Me. It’s Past Me again and boy howdy do I have a plea for you. Remember forgetting to change the delivery date for the tomato starters? Yep—April’s Fool indeed.
So if we ever have reason to order starters in the future, please don’t do that again! Even if you forget when you put the order in, CALL THE PLACE AS SOON AS YOU REALIZE WHAT YOU NEGLECTED TO DO! Seriously. Don’t assume you’ll remember to do it later. If you can’t call right that very moment, mark it on the calendar to call the very next day.
Trust me, you won’t regret it even if you feel embarrassed calling up a company to admit you made a mistake on an order. They’re used to it. Who knows? Maybe they even have betting pools as to exactly how many people will make phone calls like you will have to make because they realized too late what they didn’t do! (I probably would if I ran a nursery.)
It’s too soon to say whether Near Future Me will be crying over one or two deceased tomato starters…but I sure hope they manage to keep them alive so that doesn’t have to happen. Past Me and I already feel foolish enough. No need for Future Me to beat themself up yet another time for this mistake, right?
I don’t know what a tomato starter is!
You’re not alone in the vocabulary confusion!
They are what most folks buy at a nursery because the harder work of “starting” the plant from seed is already done. They’re what are often found in flats, for instance, but are not limited to those ubiquitous black or green preformed thin plastic cells that have been thinned to one plant per cell.
Starters can also be called plugs, seedlings, starts, or transplants. There may even be more variants, but those are the ones I’ve learned that have stuck in my grey matter as I keep digging down the rabbit hole that is garden knowledge. Some terms are more heavily or solely used depending on where you live.
Some of these terms are supposed to only apply to plants at certain stages of growth, but it’s not a guarantee! This is but one of the things that I have struggled with regarding garden terminology. Botanical/horticultural terms are not always used as one would think they should be–and even within those two seemingly science based practices, there is also some disparity of terms!
My earliest terminology headache was common plant names. Some plants can have a dozen different common names, and some common names can be a dozen different plants. It’s why I started insisting on finding the Latin names for plants for anything that wasn’t an annual kitchen crop. I can’t speak for other countries, but especially here in America commercial labels often only have the common or whatever brand name the specific cultivar was trademarked as.
Hope that helps!