oldokie, if it's working for you and you're able to maintain the necessary organics and tomato plant food, don't change it. if I'm not wanting to amend my soil, I place them farther apart in case there's not enough food.

I agree with the air issue, but if you're not having any problems, don't fret. keep at it. Dawn swears that a wider spacing produces more tomatoes and helps avoid disease. Ialways believe her, but if you're happy with production and are not having any problems stick with it.

Good job.
bon

The tomato lady is right, but I ignore the rules and do what pleases me. So, it depends on your goals.

For the most fruit per plant and possibly (this is not guaranteed) for larger fruit per plant, I'd go with 3 or 4' between plants with rows 4' apart, or if you have tons of space, rows 6' apart. I don't do that though. See....I know all the rules about the proper spacing of tomatoes, but I generally don't follow them.

I don't care how many fruit I get per plant or how big the fruit are, I just want tons and tons of tomatoes for canning. So, I usually plant my plants 3' apart in two staggered rows in a raised bed that is 4' wide. Some years I have planted them 2' apart and didn't stagger the rows....just had them lined up two by two like they were going to walk up a walkway into Noah's ark. When I was trialing a ton of varieties (150 different varieties in my biggest year, with 600 plants, not all of them inside the fenced garden because the deer hadn't really discovered the garden yet), I had them only 18" apart. Guess what? No matter what the spacing was, I got tons of tomatoes. We had all we wanted for fresh eating, plenty for canning and plenty to give away. So, I say that I think you should do what seems best for you in your conditions, with your specific soil, your growing techniques and your disease pressure.

You know, you could plant one row with one kind of spacing and another row with another kind of spacing and see which row gave you the best overall performance in terms of both the amount of fruit produced and the plant health.

I will add that last year was perpetually rainy, both before and after I planted tomatoes, and I spaced a lot of them 4' apart for better air circulation to reduce the disease pressure and it really helped a lot in a tremendously rainy year. They did great. I doubt I'll have the discipline to plant them 4' apart this year, and am likely to plant them 3' apart, but I never really know what I am going to do until planting day arrives and I have to make a decision. Then, I try to go with whatever feels right...making a decision that is more intuitive than intellectual.

If you never experiment and try different things, you'll never know if you're doing it the way that is best for you.

If I was in a tomato-growing competition with someone, I'd likely do things a bit differently because I like winning. My dad used to feed his tomato plants with Miracle Grow for Tomatoes weekly and got huge yields. I don't feed mine weekly. I barely feed them at all. I mostly feed the soil and let the soil feed the plants. I get such good production from the plants that way that I'm sort of afraid we'd be overwhelmed with too many tomatoes if I fed the plants weekly.

Honestly, the way I decide my spacing is to look at how much space is left in the garden after cool-season crops, herbs, flowers and corn and beans are planted. Then, I try to fill up that space with mostly tomatoes, saving a little room for peppers, cukes, okra southern peas and melons. The reason we have a back garden is that I have no self-discipline, so I fill up the rest of the front garden with tomato plants and have no space left for peppers, cukes, okra, southern peas and melons. The back garden gives me space for them. If I could get away with it, I'd fill the back garden with tomato plants too and create another garden space for cukes, peppers, okra, southern peas and melons, but we're running out of space that isn't covered with trees.

I have a friend who spaces his tomatoes 6' apart, but he only grows 3 or 4 plants so it is not a big deal. Most of my gardening friends plants indeterminates 3 to 4' apart and determinates 2' apart.

No matter how much space we have, it is never enough space for all the tomatoes I want to grow, so I do the best I can with what I've got.

Dawn, do you cage your tomatoes or let them sprawl?

Mary

I cage. When I let them sprawl, there's a lot more trouble with disease issues, even if I put down black plastic with mulch on top of it.

I cage also and plant much the same as oldokie. Sprawl contributes too much to soil-born disease in my neck of the woods (NE Lake T-bird sand, silt, crappy stuff). I think a LOT depends on your soil..but more depends on your time. If you've got the time to babysit those spawling plants ....power to ya! Me? Not so much...so I work with what I've got and tend to get a great harvest most years....like....I've got 4 large frozen bags from last year to process before this year's harvest takes over.....

space is not a problem I think i will use rows 6 ft apart and plant on 3 ft centers. That way I can pile the mulch a foot high in the middles with cardboard under the mulch and horse bedding on top that way I can feed the soil. I will pick certain plants to feed heavy. I will plant about 60 to 80 plants 12 varieties 30 big beef and about 4 each of my heirlooms

That sounds great, oldokie. If space is not a problem, then planting them further apart certainly won't hurt. My problem is that I have to grow everything within a fenced area to protect it from the deer, and I feel like my fenced area is never big enough. Plus, the woodland is encroaching on my fenced garden so much that my front garden is getting smaller and smaller over time. I've already lost about a third of the front garden to encroaching shade and tree roots. I hate cutting down trees, but there are days I look at the huge monster trees looming over my garden and dream of taking out all the trees that are stealing the western and northern edges of my garden away from me. There's no way to take out trees that tall without them falling into the garden so even if we decided to take out the dozen nearest the garden, we'd destroy the garden fence doing it. We should have taken out those nearest trees in 1999 when we moved here, but the wooded acreage was one reason we bought this particular place, so we didn't want to clear away any more trees than we absolutely had to. The garden seemed like it was big enough in our early years here, but back then I probably only planted 20 or 30 tomato plants per year in our very earliest years here, and I never could have imagined I'd want to plant more than that.

I've thought about the cardboard and mulch mid-row. Every fall, I chase down landscaping crews and get a pickup bed load of sacks of leaves.

I've been thinking about chopping them up with the mower and putting them mid-row , and then put cardboard on top of that. Then when my lawn gets going, I top all of that with grass clippings.

I'm sorta wary of putting leaves on top of the cardboard, on days like today with 30 mph winds, they would be gone.

I normally till most of them in, when I turn under my winter cover, but did not do that this year.

The best thing about cardboard is that it attracts earthworms like mad. The leaf mulch in my garden is mostly still in place today, and our max wind gust so far has been 38 mph. The mulch has been there a while, though, and I did chop and shred the leaves by running over them with the mower, and then it rained and they got wet so they are sort of stuck to one another unless they get really dried out. I use grass clippings too and was thinking of mowing the yard today or tomorrow just so I'll have more clippings to use in the garden. I don't deliberately use whole leaves (though some fall from the trees into the garden) because they don't stay in place. I/ve had more trouble with cardboard blowing away before I can wet it down and top it wih leaves or grass clippings than I've had with the chopped leaves or grass clippings blowing. At the rate the wind speed keeps increasing, the whole garden may blow away today.