I think the use of heat mats and shallow planting really contribute to the issue. Heat mats artificially speed up germination before the seed coat has a chance to soften and then shallow planting in soft seedling mix doesn’t “pull” the seed coat off as it should as the seedlings emerge.
Planting a touch deeper solves most of the problem and Heat mats are not generally necessary to germinate tomato seeds just fine. Speeding things up by a couple of days really doesn’t make any difference in the long run the way it does for peppers.
KarenO
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