Of course. Empty all your pots where you want to make a garden, till it in with the native soil. You may want to add more top soil, compost manure, leaf mold, etc.

Probably the old garden area has good soil. You have to clean up the area, till it (with shovel or tiller), romove all the roots. Now you will see what kind of soil you have.
Most likely you will need to amend it with compost, manure etc. To make your efforst worthwhile, make sure that the spot will get a minimum of 5 hours of direct sun and preferably more. If the area is low, you may want to raise it by adding more topsoi to it.

Clean up the space you have in mind, figure out how many tomatoes you can fit in it and leave room for walkways... then DIG it all up, get rid of old roots and any rocks you excavate, then, as cyrus_gardner suggested, add (cheap) composted steer manure, composted chicken manure (not as cheap but more nitrogen), organic amendments, et cetera. Dig these in well. You're good to go!

Right now I'm working on expanding my tomato area, I let the back half of our tiny lawn die and I intend to grow at least another six tomato plants in that space. And the climbing roses have been cut way back, I'll transplant them elsewhere and grow some Napa Grape tomatoes where the roses grew previously. AND add at least three more of those "Topsy Turvy" planters (as seen on TV), which worked way beyond my expectations last year.

I think the above suggestions are great. I would do one thing though before I started dumping the dirt from the pots on your new garden. I would first think back to last year and make sure that your so/so year was only because the pots you used were too small and not from disease. Was there any spotting or discoloration to the leaves? The reason I say this is, if you incorporate the dirt from those pots into your garden and it had any kind of the Nightshade family diseases from last year's tomatoes in it, you will be spreading it to your new garden and setting yourself up for another so/so year of tomatoes or worse.

Thanks for the ideas...

The one reason I want to use that old garden area is it probably gets the 2nd most amount of sun and I think it's screaming for tomatoes and peppers.

I hit reply to soon. I don't think disease was an issue. I really jammed the plants in (when they're small - it looks like enough space). The plants really grew (8 ft tall +)... Just not a ton of fruit. The weather here in N. Illinois wasn't great last year and I also think that hurt.

pirate
Your plants should have been fine in pots if you used "potting mix" versus "potting Soil" soil is never the best option for container growing - compacts, drainage etc can be problems - depends on when you put your plants out and how well they grew - did you get nice plants and no fruit? temp to warm to blossum and set fruit or too much N ?
You should check out posts by rnewste and meisenbacher - they are both big time container growing "studs" and can help you evaluate what happened and give you suggestions - that's who I would be asking if I had container growing issues
Just switching to the garden soil may not improve the situation if there may be something else involved

Everyone here is willing to help you out to make sure all is done to insure a better season
Dennis

I hear ya on last year's weather. I live in N. Indiana and we referred to 2009 as "the year without a summer". A lot of people around here only got two or three tomatoes off each plant before they just gave up. It made me appreciate the underwhelming crop I had, that's for sure.

I probably made every mistake a first year gardener can make.

My first issue was I just got started a little late. So my seedlings were behind schedule. Then I worried I wasn't going to get anything to grow and I bought a bunch of plants from various places. Then the seedlings ended up getting a second wind and most of them did survive. Now I had twice as many plants as I planned on having.

I didn't think I had enough time to convert any spot inn the yard to a garden, so we were going to build a raised garden. But we got so much information from friends on doing that (paralysis by analysis) that we couldn't figure out what to do; and by now it was getting close to the middle of May.

So I went over to one of the box stores and I purchased eight kid's swimming pools (that didn't prove to be enough and I ended up also purchasing another eight 20 gallon tubs which actually worked better - yes I drilled holes in everything)... But I still ended up with 6-8 plants per "pool", when 3 or 4 probably would have been closer to what I should have done. The tubs had a couple plants each. The topper of course was my wife letting me know on a daily basis how much she hated how the pools looked.

As for the mix I used Miracle-Gro and Schultz Moisture Plus Potting Mix (primarily) and then added in garden soil, potting soil, Pro-Mix and mushroom compost as filler. Why? Not sure, again we were guessing as to how to do this at the time and I was told by a friend as long as I had two-thirds potting mix I could fill in with soil, compost etc.

Everything grew and some plants were quite productive. All the smaller tomatoes produced (tons of black plums and cherry size)... Black Krims & Purple Cherokees were very productive, too. But I did have several plants where all I got was a two or three tomatoes off a 7-8 foot plant (Aunt Ginny's, Green Zebra, Julia Child, Carbon).

I do think I might have pruned too much to try and keep the plants as separate as possible and that might have hurt production. I'd like to think that if I did a better job this year that I could plant half as many plants and get as much (if not more) production.

I also need to get more red tomatoes. I had a severe shortage of medium red tomatoes.

I'm new to Indiana...last summer was my first summer here...I had what I thought was a fine garden year (not as good as the garden year I had in 2007 in N. Central Illinois, but fine). Are you telling me it gets hotter and the tomatoes are more prolific? :) I'm down by Dayton. :)

Kate