So I have nursed and coddled my little tomatoes since they were seeds in February. I transplanted them to bigger pots. I lovingly watered and grow lite my seedlings before tenderly hardening them off this Spring. Finally it is time to do some transplanting. It’s time to start transplanting my tomatoes.

Basics of Transplanting Tomatoes

This applies to all your tomatoes. Determinate, indeterminate, cherry, grape, slicer, whatever. However you want to classify your tomato this is how you transplant them into the garden.

First thing to know about tomatoes is their biology is different from most other plants in the garden. This does change how you plant them. Do not use this a planting guide for other garden plants. You will kill other plants if you plant them like tomatoes.

The big difference between the plants can be found on the stem.

See all those little hairs? These are little proto-roots. If they touch ground they will grown into roots. The goal of planting tomatoes is to cover as many of those hairs with soil as you can while still leaving some leaves. This root growth is the reason some tomato growers will plant them on a diagonal or remove the first half dozen or so flower clumps. They want root growth that can feed a killer harvest.

Lets take a look at what I got to plant in my Martian soil this year.

Lots of things and some of them are even tomatoes. Up front here you can see a few tomatoes with the Red Bull Peppers, Tomatillos, Rosemary, Swiss Chard, Mexican Oregano and Catnip. The eagle eyed person will notice that I have a bunch of Bonnie pots. I keep all the pots of any transplant that I have purchased in any given year. I have about 40 of them after nearly 15 years of gardening. My Rosemary and Swiss Chard are nursery grown this year but the rest was all me.

Since I have crap soil, my solution is going to include some eggs and worm castings. I am not sure that it will help but the wives tales say they do so I thought I would give it a whirl. You can see how I prepared my eggs here.

The Tools

So, I am going to use an number of tools for setting up this bed.

I have explained a bit about the eggs and the worm castings. What about the seeding square? I will use it to setup my distancing between my plants at 1 ft. The fork is to break stuff up with and the trowel is there to make holes.

First lets look at the bed.

Remember when I did a how to make a metal bed with the Stratco metal beds? Well this is not one of those beds. This is the Chinese knock off. I will say that I did install it upside down. The holes in the corner are suppose to be anchored in with spikes. I felt they would be more useful potentially available to me since my raised beds running off have never been an issue for me. You got to love the bow in the center. Also the interior finish came off with contact from the wingnuts so you know this one is going to be a long lived bed.

Anyway, I have my Martian soil in the bed. You can also see the sad condition of my yard. It will improve as the Bermuda wakes up from winter.

The Process

Ok, here is the meat of the transplanting tomatoes section. We have talked about tools, beds and biology, lets talk transplanting.

First, I am going to use my seeding square to make marks of roughly where I want my tomatoes with foot spacing. I am using a foot spacing because I am single stemming some indeterminate varieties.

If I was planting one of my Roma, San Marzanos or another variety of determinate then I would double the spacing and take the seeding square make two square marks then plan were the first and second square meet.

Finally, if I was going to let an indeterminate grow wild then I would give up on the seeding square divide my 3′ x 6′ bed in half and plant in the center of each half. Use the edges to grow radishes, lettuce, herbs and such.

Finally, lets get one that has been in its pot too long but is nice a big to look at.

Alright, you see all that lower growth. It is already weak but will rot if planted. We need to remove the excess side growth.

You can use your snips if it is really big but I just use my hands and pinch off the excess growth.

Notice that I left the tops alone. I will be trimming it again in a few weeks as the plant grows but for now, I want that growth photosynthesizing.

Dig a hole. Now I only have about a foot in this raised bed so I am not going to get as much of the tomato underground as I would prefer. Here is a picture as I size the hole of the plant.

Amendments

Make sure you have a bit of dirt at the bottom for the roots to grow into. I add my amendments. In this case an egg and worm castings.

So with the dirt and amendments in the hole. Blend it up with your garden fork.

If you want to add different amendments, you follow the same general steps. You could add bone meal or rock phosphate to the hole if you want. I know those are other common amendments for the tomatoes.

Transplanting Tomatoes

Time to pull the plant from the pot. If you are like me an behind in your planting then you may run into some root bound plants.

If that happens, tease the roots out by softly tickling the bottom of the plant.

With the roots all dangling we can shove it into the hole.

Back fill the plant.

You want to cover stem of the plant as much as you can. Because my plant was so tall, it has more space than is ideal between the ground and the leaves. You can bury it up to the point of the leaves touching the ground or side shoots are buried.

You do not want any leaves to touch the ground as that is where tomato diseases live. Also pinch the stems of any side growth you are burying unless that remove the leaves of the plant. Then reposition the plant to get them above ground.

What about Planting Determinate Tomatoes?

The process is pretty much the same. You will want to install your cage on them but otherwise for tomatoes starts you treat them the same. It is the post transplant pruning where they differ. In the transplant stage, it is only the spacing as we discussed up above.

That is really all there is to transplanting tomatoes. In fact this is more complicated than most years as I am adding soil amendments to the hole. Most years, my heavy compost garden does not need anything so I skip the amendments section. But every year is different so it took a touch more work than usual.