📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Lighting and Bloom Time
- 💡 The Experiment: Traditional literature states it takes 14 to 21 days for a tomato flower bud to fully open. However, under indoor supplemental grow lights, this timeline is drastically shortened.
- ⏱️ The Results: With good lighting, the heirloom ‘German Red Strawberry’ progressed from bud to bloom in about 12 days, while the early-season ‘Burkovsky Early’ took just 8 days!
Keeping a close eye on your plants yields some really interesting data…Gardening literature usually states that it takes about 2 to 3 weeks from the formation of a flower bud to actual blooming. But they never specify the growing conditions! It is logical to assume that with supplemental indoor grow lights, the buds will open sooner, but by how much?
My little “guinea pigs” gave me a surprise today. While moving around ‘Burkovsky Early’ and ‘German Red Strawberry’ (Nemetskaya Krasnaya Klubnika), I noticed they already have a second set of flower clusters forming, and the first flowers on the first clusters are swollen and ready to pop.
If they bloom in about 2 days, that means it took exactly 12 days for the German Red Strawberry, and only 8 days for the Burkovsky Early (since I first spotted its buds on April 9th).
I should probably wait to see the actual blooming day to be 100% sure. But Burkovsky is heading out to the garden tomorrow, and the German Red Strawberry is getting its top chopped off tomorrow anyway…
Here are some pics of the Burkovsky Early buds:
Curious about why Valery is “chopping the top off“ his German Red Strawberry just as it’s about to bloom? This is a very common technique among short-season European growers! Often referred to as “cloning” or “topping”, growers will intentionally start indeterminate heirloom seeds very early under lights. Once the plant gets too tall for the indoor setup, they cut off the top 6–8 inches and root it in water. This effectively gives you two plants for the price of one, lowers the fruiting height of the original plant, and stalls growth just enough to wait out the last spring frosts!
