I don't think it will in your zone but it never hurts to try. I.m going for some small hoop houses on large raised containers. It will extend the season but doubt the tomatoes will survive the 0-10 degrees we often get. I've got a brandywine sucker that was given to me late in the season and would like a fruit or 2 for seeds next year. I think it just got a couple flowers pollinated. I could go as far as running warm water to them at a trickle if need be on colder days.

i agree they probably were volunteers that came back from the cherry tomatoes year after year i'm from new mexico which is nowhere near as cold as indiana and we couldn't get them to survive past thanksgiving if you really like the plant take a cutting and pot it and you be set for next spring...

OK, it will survive, it you want to jump through more hoops than Hula made. Build a frame around it, add a 100 watt light bulb or two, take the plastic off every so often and water the ground.

I'm in Cincy and I would never go through the trouble of even trying to overwinter an outdoor, in-ground plant. If it was a spectacular, award-winning, 12-foot tall plant that produced 55 pounds of fruit - yeah, take a cutting or at the least save some seeds. But try to deal with snowfalls/freezing rain that can amount to a foot or more, or temps in the minus single or double digits, soil that can freeze 6-7 inches deep in a normal year - no thanks! I would rather start from scratch.

Mike

Large tomatoes can reseed, too. My neighbor had some large hybrid beefsteaks that reseeded in 2014 (they didn't breed true, of course, but they were still large beefsteaks). What you can do is scatter the seeds where you want them to grow, the fall before (the more seeds, the better). Just squishing a fruit where you want the seeds to grow may also work. The next year, they might grow back. No guarantees. Tomatoes that are part wild tomato might have a high success rate. You could probably breed the ability to reseed into Black Krim even if it's not prone to it. You might just need a lot of seeds the first year (and maybe more years).

Tomato plants are not likely to live through the winter in Indiana. I'm not sure if covering them well will work, but it's worth a try. You might consider trying the same thing with Litchi Tomatoes instead of actual tomatoes. They (the actual plants) can survive a freeze down to about 15° F. or so. Indiana probably gets a little colder than that, but covering is more likely to help than it is with tomatoes.

Tomato plants are said to be perennial. But you have to have a very mild, non-freezing winters like in some parts of SoCal. Or you can overwinter them in greenhouse. I am not sure that an overwintered plant will be of any advantage to young plant.

Overwintered peppers and tomatoes are sometimes said to be more productive on the second and maybe also third years. I imagine that's not true for every variety in every condition. So, there's potential advantage there, but whether it's worth it or not probably depends on a lot of things. I wouldn't recommend overwintering a diseased or insect-ridden plant. I would recommend saving seeds and planting year after year instead of buying new seeds, though (since that can also have benefits with production, and other things).

In in Phoenix area and overwinter tomatoes--it's actually summer, not winter, that kills mine. But, they go dormant when it gets into the 30s. I don't know how you'll keep the soil and air around a plant that far north from dipping below 35. They just can't dip below that temp at all. You'd have better luck with digging up and potting the plant and caring for it the way people overwinter peppers than trying to keep it outside.

I live in Nebraska and I tried to see how long my tomato plants would last. I put up a 8'x9'x40' 6 mil poly enclosure around them. They lasted until mid December with a little supplemental heat. They did like the extra CO2 from the propane heater used at night, though. Once the Sun lowered its trajectory they were done. I had fresh tomatoes stored until February in my home. Its a lot of work, if you're up for it

Try moving to Miami, Florida. Winter is our growing season. We are the winter vegetable capital of the country. Summer here kills everything.

I did have one plant I managed to nurse thru one of our killer summers. It stopped producing during the worst of the heat and once the heat broke it started producing again. It never matched the first season.

I've never lived in Miami, but I've looked at UV indexes and it seems Miami has the highest out of anywhere in the country, probably. So, it should be easier to sunburn there than just about everywhere else. Plants can struggle in UV rays, but blue tomatoes should get really blue, and the produce should be extra nutritious. The UV index might be more of a problem than the heat, is what I'm thinking. Florida is generally pretty warm, but the highs aren't super high compared to some areas. However, they may be more consistently high. Tell me if I'm wrong, please. I'm curious about Miami weather. I know weather companies don't always report what it seems to be, too.

It looks like the lows can be pretty warm in Miami, too, though (maybe too warm for several kinds of tomatoes at night).

It gets plenty cool at night mid winter, but our last hard freeze was in 72.

Why would you want to overwinter a tomato plant? I may be wrong but that sounds like an invitation to disease. Most tomato plants are looking pretty senescent by the end of one growing season anyway.

Rockets don't puncture the atmosphere and let in more uv light. Heat in an area is totally unrelated to rocket launches.

Rockets do burn up the ozone in the atmosphere as they pass through it allowing more UV rays to reach the surface. With increasing rocket traffic in the private (tourism) sector and space-based solar programs they are expected to wreak more havoc than CFC's did on the atmosphere. They don't report much on the subject because there are only a couple of launches per week around the planet. They cause more immediate damage to the upper and middle stratospheric ozone layers, though. Not too mention the soot and aluminum oxide they dump into the atmosphere. Since they tend to launch rockets in the same locations those areas suffer more than others do.

"Why would you want to overwinter a tomato plant?"

I ended up pulling the tomato plants that survived over winter when I did my spring planting. But even at the time they were pulled, they were producing a few tomatoes. This year the Houston area winter was very mild, I've been harvesting peppers and a few tomatoes all winter long.

The pepper plants were just trimmed back a little because they were bushy and producing a lot.

"Rockets do burn up the ozone in the atmosphere as they pass through it allowing more UV rays to reach the surface."

Ha. Global circulation and mixing moves and spreads that tiny trail of ozoneless gas over most of the world on a time scale of days. To the extent it is a problem, it is for most of the world, not just Florida.

Yeah, I can tell you're not a rocket scientist, if even a scientist.

I live in San Diego and a yellow teardrop tomato plant overwjbtered despite me totally ignoring it for months. It's an ugly looking thing but it produces a ton of tomatoes. I wonder if I should cut it back in December .