Sprouting Tomato Plants

Check it out! Those are little tomato sprouts (I apologize for the 90 degree image rotation. Just tip your head to the left and they'll look right). In my increasingly-failed attempt to not garden so much, I was hoping to put seed starting behind me, but I need to confess that this gives me the happy jolt of the husbandry victory. Sure, they could die in a thousand ways from this early point, but they're on their way, and I did this.

Dig the set up? In past years I've used those pre-packaged trays with peat moss pellets. This year I was avoiding spending money and peat moss. I wasn't starting seeds, so why buy anything? As for the peat moss, I can't see what is sustainable about mining a carbon-storing material that accumulates at about a foot per millennium. Gardeners should stop using peat moss if they have any pretenses towards sustainability. (Googling on the topic yielded a bunch of industry-penned pages making suspiciously vague arguments that there's nothing wrong with mining peat moss. The fundamentals of peat formation and its value in carbon storage, though, indicate otherwise.). So I just used a little compost in blue Solo cups with plastic bags to hold in the moisture till they sprouted. The south-facing window should do fine. They might come up a little leggy, but that's never posed a problem for me in the past.