Little tomato seedlings...sort of

So, the first sprout you saw in my last post is all but gone. You can see it in this picture below. It was the first out of the gate, but the "seed" part never fell off, the leaves never emerged, and eventually the whole thing shrivelled up.

Luckily, there were two other plants that sprouted up in the same pod. Although neither of them are showing leaves yet either, so we're still not out of the woods yet.

When I looked carefully, I noticed there was a plant wedged underneath the paper cover for the pods (look to the left of the big green sprout in the photo, below the cover).

I took a paper clip and gently nudged the plant so that it went through the hole. The plant was pretty weak, but it was also pretty long, having probably grown for days without me having noticed because it was growing under the cover.

So this is what tomato pod #1 looks like now. The first sprout to come up is officially dead, but there are three others vying to be the top dog. According to the Aerogarden instructions, only the strongest plant can remain--all others must be pruned. So for the next few weeks, we'll have our own tomatoey version of Survivor. While we're waaaay behind what was promised in the instruction manual as far as timing goes, the good news is, we do have greenery. A few more days, and hopefully we'll see a strong winner emerge.

Here's what the other pod looks like. Much better, as the leaves have actually made it on two of the plants. Note that I had to do the paper clip trick to nudge that top plant out into the sunlight. Again, we'll see if the lights and nutrients can get the weak plant a little stronger. If I were a betting person, I'd put money on the lowermost plant though.

Will provide an update in a few days. But it looks like they're all out of the gate, with a little help from a paper clip!