Now it’s late April and the dangers of frost are long gone. Lets get these plants outside. Space is very limited where I live and run my business. I need to use as much space as tastefully as possible to grow my produce. I use half of my balcony to grow the transplanted tomatoes, jalapeno peppers, habanero peppers, bell peppers and cilantro. Remember, I started my plants from seed and now have them in their final growing pots. The plants get about 8 hours of south east sun a day and get watered about once a week dependent upon how much rain we get. 
Since my plants were started in the middle of fall, I allowed the plants to bask under the grow lights for about 14 hours a day. For watering, I allowed the soil to become dry then gave the plants a good soaking. Allowing the soil to completely dry kept the fungus gnats in check. They needed transplanting a couple of times because of how fast they were growing. After about 30-40 days I needed to once again rearrange my living area to accommodate the fast growing plants. My peppers also started getting flowers on them. To keep my pepper plants a little longer I plucked of the flowers to keep them from fruiting. The plants thrived over the winter so in my next post I am going to fast forward a couple of months to spring and summer.
Every since I started my food business, the ultimate goal was to grow my own produce for my salsa, TommyV’s Salsa. The one obstacle I had to overcome was where to grow my produce. I have a certified kitchen in my home to make my delicious salsa but I live in a 900 square foot space on the 10th floor with a balcony. Looking around my place for available space I decided to turn the dining room into the area where I will grow my produce. Rearranging the dining room was not too bad, but finding space to store what was in the dining room was a bit challenging. After spending hours coming up with creative ways to store things, I finally have space to start growing. To put it all in perspective, it was mid October of 2009 when I started my urban indoor garden. I planted from seed, tomatoes and bell peppers to see if it was all possible.
I started the seeds in the paper type egg cartons. I place the egg cartons into vented plastic bins and placed it on top of a heating pad. Within a week I had seedlings sprouting. I then place all the seedlings into a large plastic tub and constructed a structure to hang my grow lights.
Welcome to Tommy V Foods, LLC. My name is Tommy and I am the founder/CEO of Tommy V Foods, LLC. I started my food business out of necessity because I was laid of from my job back in 2008. Because I couldn’t find another position in my field, which was graphic/web design, I decided to follow my passion for cooking. It’s been a long journey since I sold my first container of salsa and the journey has just begun. Over the next few months I am going to be documenting on the projects I’ve been working on.