Planting for a Late Season Tomato Harvest

Early July is not too late to plant tomatoes in the vegetable garden to insure that your table will be full of fresh tomatoes throughout the season until November or frost.

Here are some successful instructions for planting tomatoes in early July for a late harvest: 

1. Plant only tomato plants - not seed - at this time in the season!
2. Plant your tomato plants in 30” diameter cages.  Spacing for these cages should be 5’ between each plant within a row and 6’ between each row.  This insures that you will get plenty of light and allows you to easily walk between your plants to pick the fruit.
3. I do not prune these plants - just push errant growth back into the cages.
4. You are far better off planting just one plant of several different varieties rather than 4-6 of one variety.  The wide variety will allow you to have plants that deal with the weather differently and will increase your total production over a longer period of time.  Some varieties will be more disease resistant one year than the next.

Some of my favorite tomatoes include ‘Cherokee Purple’ (the sweetest tasting), ‘Green Zebra’ (green and white flesh), ‘Yellow Pear’, ‘Moby Grape’ (long lasting), ‘Super Steak’ (weight up to 6 lbs.), ‘Yellow Striped German’ (orange and yellow flesh), ‘Mr. Stripey’ (red and white flesh), and ‘Garden Peach’ (looks and feels like a peach).

There is nothing more attractive than an array of sliced tomatoes of 7 different varieties that will give you a multitude of flavors, colors, shapes, and sizes

To provide a steady supply of other vegetables through the growing season, continue to plant each month small amounts of beans, Swiss chard, beets, radishes, and squash.  Most seed varieties will give you time frames from plants to harvest.