When the tomato sprouts develop firm leaves, it’s time to move on to the next step. At this stage you need a new tray and its matching sieve basket, Vermiculite, mesh net, and liquid fertilizer. For the liquid fertilizer, I used Hyponica.

For the tray and sieve basket, I got a dish drainer basket and tray from a 100-yen shop. I put mesh net on the bottom of the dish drainer basket and covered it with Vermiculite, about one centimeter high.

Then I put the tea filter bags with seedlings on top of the Vermiculite base. I used bamboo skewers as poles and put them into each filter bag. The bamboo skewers were used temporarily: the seedlings grew fast, the bamboo skewers were soon too short.

So far, the plants are like the picture above. Since this was my first experiment, I didn’t know how many filter bags I should put into the base. You just need to watch the seedlings grow, and then it’s a wait-and-see situation. The plants grew so fast that I soon found the setting with the dense seedlings to be inadequate as seedbeds. The result of this experiment, though I demonstrating how to make the base, shows that skipping this process may help the tomatoes grow more efficiently.