When can we plant tomatoes?

Will it ever warm up? It is still too cool to plant tomatoes and other warm weather crops outdoors, tomatoes need night time temperatures that are consistently over 50° and soil temperatures over 60° Peppers would like it even warmer!

Until it warms up I recommend moving tomatoes from  4" pots into a gallon sized pots, then to a 2 gallon pot. Setting them in the sun each day (or sheltering them from rain and hail) and moving them inside at night. Once the weather has warmed, dig a deep hole, remove the lower branches and leaves and plant the tomato deeply, allowing the stem/trunk to sprout roots. The video below was taken 4 years ago, since then I've perfected my tomato growing method, now I train them onto a trellis instead of staking them; however you choose to grow them. be sure to use a very sturdy support.

Trellised Tomatoes.
Each plant is pruned to 2 to 3 main stems that are tied to the cattle panel trellis.

It is time to plant warm weather veggies!

It's not too late to plant tomatoes! The weather is warm enough to plant all of the warm weather crops, AND it is time to start planning your FALL and WINTER gardens :)

2013 Tomato Planting

Thanks to generous Campbell Garden Sponsors, garden volunteers planted tomatoes and peppers in our Harvest Sharing Garden on May 19th.

Black Gold donated organic fertilizer to help our plants thrive!

Hansen Family Farm is sponsoring our tomato garden again this year by giving us 20 tomato plants and 14 pepper plants. The Hansen's grow an amazing assortment of veggie starts for sale at the Milwaukie Farmers Market on Sundays and at the Oregon City Farmers Market on Saturdays.

While mid-May was still a little early for setting tomato and other warm weather plants directly out into the garden (they really prefer warmer weather), thanks to the generous donation of greenhouse plastic from Naomi's Organic Farm Supply and metal hoops from Family Table Farm, we were able to tuck our tomatoes and peppers into a warm cloche. We will keep the plastic on until the temperatures are consistently warm and the threat of severe rains are past.

We learned a lot in our first year growing veggies to donate through our Harvest Sharing Program. Unusual colored tomatoes didn't go over well with many of our harvest recipients; we would often find the brownish or purplish tomatoes left in the previous weeks donation box; and those colored tomatoes were harder for some of our volunteer pickers to determine ripeness of, resulting in a few tomatoes left to spoil on the vines. This year we are concentrating on growing round, red tomatoes, with just a few colored ones thrown in for variety. Split resistant varieties that will hold up while being transported are important; . Christie Hansen helped us pick out the tomato varieties to grow. See the list below:

Tomatoes

New Yorker

Stupice

Tomatoes and peppers tucked into a cloche.

Yellow Pear

Valley Girl

Dark Orange Muscat

Sweet Million

Snow White

Rutgers

Green Zebra

Momotoro

Taxi

Peppers

California Wonder

Anaheim

Marconi Red

Roumanian Rainbow

Wisconsin Lakes

Jaloro

Early Jalapeno

Serrano

Wenk’s Yellow Hot

Training Tomato Plants

Our tomato plants have really appreciated the recent warm weather and are starting to really grow and flower, a few even have small fruit. Tomatoes left to grow on their own tend to vine and sprawl all over the ground. Taking the time to train them to grow up onto a structure of some kind will reward us with healthier plants with fruit that can be easier to pick. Campbell Gardeners are employing several different methods of training their plants.

Traditional style tomato cages in yellow and red complement the marigolds for a pretty combination...imagine red ripe fruit in this colorful  mix!

One of our Square Foot Gardeners is trellising their tomatoes on netting and PVC pipe.

This gardener decided to try out a combination of metal T-posts and wire after figuring out the cost to outfit his large number of plants with traditional cages...I think we could name his system a "Tomato Corral"

This gardener isn't growing tomatoes sideways, it just looks that way. They are staking their plants to wood stakes and are using old pantyhose and pipe cleaners to keep them in line.

This gardener is using stakes and twine to make a cross between a cage and a trellis.

This gardener found a very attractive solution to tomato cages that want to topple over. They enclosed the cages in bamboo tee pees.

For detailed instructions on how to prune and train tomato plants, see the two videos below.
Here is a video from the University of Main Extension Service that show how to stake indeterminate tomatoes:



Here is a link  from Fine Gardening Magazine on pruning and trellising tomatoes.