What do you do with tomato plants in the winter? If you don’t have a burn pile or a burn bucket, then discard diseased crops with your local trash. Your new compost will add extra pathogens to next season’s garden. If you leave them to break down in the compost pile, then the invaders have abundant means to multiply during the off season. Why not simply compost dead tomato plants, regardless of diseases they suffered? Because many tomato pathogens and creepy-crawly larvae winter over in the soil.
As plants blaze and smolder, so will the fungi, bacteria, and larvae that affected your crop. They will break down into glorious black gold and add luscious nutrients to your garden soil next season.īut if your tomato plants had even a hint of tomato blight or tomato wilt – or if insects snacked ferociously on your tomato plants – do not compost them. Pull up those faithful shrubs and deposit them on your compost pile. If your plants lived a relatively disease-free and pest-free season, then celebrate. Were your tomato plants healthy or did they succumb to tomato diseases or a pest infestation? While you’re at it, remove dead leaves, diseased leaves, fallen fruit, mummified fruit, and additional debris.īy clearing out your dead tomato plants you remove pathogens at the same time … and you minimize future problems in the garden. Once cold temperatures hit your garden, your tomato growing season is over for sure and for certain. Fruit are smaller and less flavorful in your late season crop than summer’s bounty.īut tomato plants cannot survive a hard freeze or frost. However, while you’re waiting for the end of the season, tomato blossoms are few and far between. Indeterminates, on the other hand, keep producing fruit until Mother Nature freezes them out. Your determinate tomato plants will shrivel, drop their fruit, and leaves turn brown – in early fall or even in late summer. Determinate tomatoes produce the largest number of their crop in a short window of time and shut down before indeterminates.
If you grow determinate tomatoes, you won’t have much guesswork. How do you know when tomato plants are done producing?
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