Planting tomatoes in the field

It is not even halfway through March and the first tomatoes of the year are already planted in the field.

On Monday we planted an extra early succession of three varieties of tomatoes with the weather warming up and the longterm forecast not predicting for there to be any very cold spells upcoming in the next two weeks.

Last year it was much colder and we waited until the end of March to plant and even then got a really cold day that was in the mid-30s at the start of April. That doesn’t look like it will be happening but it could and we are better prepared this year.

We have these plants under row cover which should keep them a degree or two warmer while not letting them deal with all the weather like this upcoming few days of lots of wind.

This first planting we only did a few varieties that handled the earlier planting better than the over varieties in the past two years and also are very popular.

The varieties are Early Girl, Cherokee Purple and Sungold. So one red tomato that is good to slice or have in salads, one delicious heirloom and everyone’s favorite cherry tomato.

To get plants in the ground this early and have them be so large we actually seeded them on the first of January into small trays. After spending a month in those small trays we potted them up to a much larger than normal cell for each plant where they were able to grow lots of roots and become very vigorous.

There are five successions of tomatoes this year we are planning on doing with three middle ones being the main ones. The last one is the smallest with just two varieties.

Having the successions we hope it spreads out when all the plants are in peak production as we would prefer having a more consistent amount of tomatoes over a long period of time compared to a few weeks with all the tomatoes ripening at once.

Along tomatoes, we’ll start planting more summer crops out in the field in the next few weeks with the last of the spring crops. We’ve been focusing on getting the soil ready for the summer crops and adding compost to get some healthy veggies this summer.

With days in the 70s forecasted for this weekend everything is prepared to grow so staying on top of the weeding is crucial along with watering the spring veggies to prevent them from getting stressed.

There was a little bit of rain Monday night which the plants loved but they will need more with the warmer days and the wind which dries out the soil.