Six weeks into the VeggiePro, it looks like we're getting somewhere

Here's what the plants look like this week.

As you can see, the plant to the right has grown like wildfire since the last update. In fact, the leaves are growing so that they stretch outside of the lights.

The plant to the left has grown surprisingly impressively as well, much more than I expected.

The VeggiePro manual gives instructions to prune the tomato plants after four or five weeks, specifically, to chop off everything that is growing above the first five branches. Since it's been over weeks and the plant doesn't even have five main branches yet, I'll be disregarding this initial pruning and instead skipping ahead to the section titled "ongoing pruning". The instructions here say to cut off leaves that are growing outside the Lamp Hood's lights. Indeed, I noticed that leaves which the lights weren't reaching were growing brown. No use in using up the precious nutrients on leaves that'll never produce fruit.

After pruning, the floor looked like what our kitchen floor used to look like when my dad used to give me haircuts as a kid.

And look at how well-manicured the tomato plant is. Makes me want to go into bonsai. If you click on the photo and take a close look, you'll see that there are even little flower buds starting to form. I've got a good feeling about this. For good measure, I even started hand-pollinating the plants, again from the instruction manual of the VeggiePro.

As you can see, I've been raising the lamp arm to accomodate new growth of the bigger plant, and have been dutifully refilling the water (which now needs refilling once every few days thanks to an impressive root system starting to form and take in the water and nutrients). Having been somewhat burned already by the cherry tomato experience of a few months ago, I'm not getting too excited yet, but after a shaky start, the plants are definitely doing much better.