It's funny you say that, I JUST saw a YouTube video (about ten minutes ago) saying to keep three tomato seedlings together for their whole lives, too.

Interested to hear from anyone who has tried this. Good question valray, thanks!

Multiple Planting has been around for a long tome.

Squash, cucumbers, melons, potatoes , ... are often planted in groups of 2 even 3 per hill. So, for example you can plant 3 peppers together ( about 6" apart. Then plant another group TWO feet away.(center-to-center) As a result 3 peppers are planted in 4 sq-ft, or in average one per 1.33 sq-ft.

I have read this advice as well as the opposite and I've tried both with habaneros. I think my results with single planting have been better. I did get bigger peppers by putting two in a pot, but I also got noticeably fewer of them, and the peppers seemed to have a waxy color about them.

On the other hand, I've also had bad luck with peppers far apart. So it seems like a happy medium is best.

A saying I read about peppers was that "peppers like to hold hands" meaning that they do best when planted close enough together that, when grown, their leaves will overlap slightly. This seems to be the happy medium for me. Growing at that distance produced abundant, medium sized, rich orange habaneros.

I also do not thin them at all. I start lots and lots of individual seedlings, and then transplant them into place. Thinning just makes me feel bad about the plants that get pulled up. :( So I only do it with seeds that are too small to handle individually, like argula.

Angie

There seems to me to be a couple of different options here. Close planting - holding hands, love that - might be worth a try, 6" apart. But I think the almanac site was saying to leave seedlings very close, 1/2" or so, and grow them more as a multi-stemmed plant. I haven't been able to find much about this but one link (can't find again right now) was about increased yields in the fields when a couple of tomato plants/seeds were planted in each hole. Interesting and counter-intuitive. Also helps when/if one plant dies, the other carries on and doesn't leave a gap in the planting. I think I'll try some of my peppers and tomatoes like this.