Did you have disease problems last year that overwinter in soil? If no, then go ahead an plant your tomatoes IMHO.

Yeah if it is the only option. But you are assuming the plant roots will all stay in that same spot/hole and they don't. The average tomato plant root ball is much bigger than 4-5". So what are they going to run into outside the confines of the whole.

It is the reason landscapers don't recommend planting permanent landscaping items in the perfectly prepared hole rather than prepping the entire area first. Grows great there for awhile but then begins to fail. So if you are going to do it make sure it is a really big hole. :-)

Dave

I used to switch the bean bed and tomatoes but stopped that years ago. No-till but i double dig in some fresh bags of seasoned compost. The toms like their bed just fine. Peas and beans are happy where they are. No different in growing out. I don't remove anything, just add some good fresh stuff.

I suppose i read so much and had a worry for a time, but got lazy and see no different except i do pay attention to my soil quality and let it be without too much fussing. It could always be better and some get caught up in needing this and that....

My tomatoes stay in the same area for 3 years and then they swap with the beans/beats/kale/ etc. It's not perfect as we get Septoria and Early Blight, but quite honestly, I think we would get it anyway because it blows in on the wind and the rain.....

Linda

I agree, I try to move my stuff around but in such a small area I dont think it helps much. I just use disease resistant varieties and take preemptive action to prevent diseases. Last year was the first time Ive had a real bad infestation with late blight. Im in central WI and it was a problem in this area last summer. There were many potato fields decimated by it. I picked bad leaves off every day. Luckily the tomato plants were almost replacing old leaves with new ones just as quick and my tomatoes were far enough along that I was still able to harvest a decent amount of them. When the weather starts getting sunny and warmer here in a week Id like to put down clear plastic to try and bake the dirt and kill any spores that may be remaining since we didnt get a hard winter to kill them

I've grown tomatoes in the same beds since 2004. I have used only compost that I make. I have grown many diff varieties over the years but found I prefer the cherry and grape varieties.

Last year I moved a compost pile to the bed next to the tomato bed and couldn't eat them fast enuff. Most were germinated from culls from the previous year.

I'd say just as long as you are not looking for trophies and have not had any major problems in the past you should be OK.

But you won't know until you try. Keep us posted.

Good Luck

Sorry as I may have mis-understood your question. I didn't interpret it as others have - growing in the same bed or even in the same garden area. I read it as in the exact same hole.

Many home gardeners grow their plants in the same beds or gardens every year and as long as the soil has been well maintained and replenished in the entire bed or even garden row - no problems. So we aren't talking about crop rotation here.

But you mention soil that has been under landscape fabric for multiple years now and has not had any work done on it, correct? You mention cages already staked in the same places used in previous years, right? So all you would be doing is digging a new 4-5" hole in the same exact place, mixing in some fresh soil, and re-planting, correct?

If so then that is a very different situation than just staying in the same garden, same area, or the same bed.

Feel free to ignore if I have mis-understood your question.

Dave

Dave, you are right. Same exact hole.

I've planted cherry tomatoes under the same fixed trellises for a decade. Maybe not in precisely the same holes, but pretty nearly. Certainly in the same line. No problems whatsoever. Whyever would you take out the "old soil"? What do you mean by "brand new soil"? What exactly is your concern? I just don't see it. Are you suggesting that the "old soil" is "used up" in some way? Dig it up, throw in a scoop or two of compost, and if you haven't had any disease problems in that spot, you're good to go.

I use weed fabric in my garden as well, but I lift it and amend the soil between crops or between seasons. (I say this as if I've been doing it for a long time--this is really just the second year of most of my garden being under the fabric. I'm waiting to see how long the fabric lasts, with me violating the warranty by failing to mulch over it.)

For example, a couple of weeks ago I swapped three different thirty-foot-by-six-foot pieces of fabric. The piece at location A had holes from last year that were suitable for location B, and the piece at location B had holes suitable for location C, which had holes suitable for location A. So I lifted them all, amended their soil, and put the fabric back down in its new home..

In your case, I think that I'd sacrifice the fabric over the tomatoes--cut it out if necessary, amend the top of the soil, scratch those amendments in to the extent that you can with the rebar interfering, and then arrange fresh fabric with the assumption that you'll do it again. You could cut a hole for each tomato location, cut across the fabric to that point to allow you to lay the fabric around the rebar, and then "patch" that cut with more fabric. (I find that for a reasonably weedproof "patch", I need to overlap by about 10 inches. I prefer 18, but that's a full three feet of fabric per patch, and I get cheap.)

Then you could lift the patch and the fabric every year, and keep doing this until the tomatoes start showing disease or the fabric breaks down. (And if the first thing that happens is disease, you could use the rebar to support something like chicken wire and switch to growing pole beans or some other climbing crop.)

It's the same for me. I grow my tomatoes in a raised bed and the plants get put pretty much in the same holes because that's the way that the spacing works best!

We add some aged cow manure every year, so they get fresh nutrients.

Linda

How do you fertilize? I agree I would at least pull up the fabric to amend the soil with some compost.

Yes, I agree pulling up fabric is best. Just being lazy. I have many trellis anchored as well as tomato cages that I would have to reset, plus the thought of plugging the holes in the fabric and welcoming a new task to my other million doesn't set well. To answer others question, I just fully removed the soil from the holes and put in bagged organic soil. I threw soil from hole somewhere else in the yard. I figure it's not foolproof to say the least but might help. I've just done lettuce so far but my tomatoes will be next

I think it will be fine - as long as you didn't have any devastating tomato diseases last year. I shouldn't think the lettuce would mind being planted in the same spot.

Linda

I grow mine in a raised bed. Trellis up to wooden supports screwed to the wood frame and a string dropped down to the plant from a cross beam.

In fall, just cut the stem off at the ground then cut the string. I leave the root in the ground. I don't add soil and despise weed fabric but if you tried this method I could see where it would be easier for you to use the fabric.

To be clear, the string and supports hold up better to the fall rains and hurricane winds when the plants are loaded with fruit than any cages and stakes I have ever used.

You just twist the stem around the string as the plant grows when you are out in the garden watering or doing something else.

Also works great for cukes, melons, squash, or any vining plant.

The point is you wouldn't have to remove and re-install all those support hardware things.

Thanks for the suggestion. I've always wanted to run the tomatoes up a string, just don't have time. Maybe when I retire. My cages are made from concrete reinforcing wire with two pieces of rebar for support. They never move. I unfortunately can't devote a lot of time to garden, so I make some decisions on speed, like the fabric. I gotta tell you not weeding is awesome. Even with mulches I've had weeds pop out, and not 1 or 2. So with the cages, like Ron popeil says, I set them and forget them. I pray for a rain or two a week so I don't have to lug water out there, and many times it happens this way. While fabric is certainly not the old fashion way, I wonder why someone would have problems with it...

Some people think that plastic is not organic, but (despite that worry) I have used black plastic and it's amazing, both for warming up the soil, and for weed and moisture control. I have been lucky enough to not have to water much at all beyond the initial plant out of my tomatoes. My "organic" friend sourced it as the most friendly black plastic she could find, used by someone who grows strawberries commercially.

Linda

When I have used weed fabric weeds still root thru the fabric. Removing the weeds tears the fabric leaving pieces behind that will be here longer than me. I could never get it all out and still find pieces.

But hey if it works for you and you are happy with that is fine. Gardening is not a one-size-fits-all, tho that is what many would like.

I use mulch, it feeds the soil when its done keeping the weeds down. No it doesn't keep em all down either but the worms love it. :-)

If weeds go through, you have a poor quality fabric. I've tried many types and half I had were ineffective and half effective. I currently use Dewitt p5 on eBay and it works completely.

You rotate crops every year in an ideal world, but the reality is not ideal in most cases.

I don't see how the quality of fabric could stop wind blown seeds from germinating on the fabric? So it's not that weeds grow up thru the fabric, it's on top and the roots grow thru the fabric.

Gumby - sorry I misunderstood you. I almost never had your problem. If you leave dirt on top of the fabric, or let leaf and plant scraps decompose and don't clean up, yes I've had that problem. But only then. At a homeowner sized garden, where you visit it and can clean off anything on top every once in a while, it hasn't been a problem.

No reason to be sorry. It works for you but didn't for me. No problem. Such is gardening.

To me gardening is one huge experiment.

So far, I only get weeds through holes in the fabric, including holes made by ground staples. Unbroken expanses of fabric have not yet been invaded by weeds. I'm also using DeWitt Pro 5. I'm very curious to see how long the fabric lasts, and if it ends up being long enough for the fabric to be cost-effective.

Most staples I have are tight enough I don't get weeds through.

Occasionally one will pop through.

I have my film on at least three years now. Seems as strong as when new. The fuzzy underside material I've noticed may come off a little easier, and frankly I'm worried when i do take the material up I hope the fuzzy material doesn't peel off and get stuck to the dirt below. It will be a mess to clean up. I don't think I'd buy the type with the fuzzy underside again....

Weeds-through-staples seem to depend on the location--in some places I get none; in others I can find the staples easily by walking to the neatly spaced weeds.

And, yep, one of the several pieces that I lifted recently did indeed leave globs of fuzz on the dirt. I just left them there, and ended up tilling them in. I hope I don't regret that later.

Edited to add: One of my issues with this lift-the-fabric thing is that the staples are much more difficult to insert once they're used and rusty. I'm wanting to find some sort of clip scheme, but I don't know exactly how I'd work that.

I used to cut coat hangers for many years, but for some reason decided to splurge a few years ago and buy stainless staples off the internet. They are a million times better. Strong and keeps the fabric down.

Still wondering why you want to remove soil and replace it. What's wrong with the soil you have there already? What does "brand new soil" provide? Did I miss something ... ? That seems like a lot of work.

A bag of staples is like $2 at Home Depot.

The $2 staples (well, they come in a large bag at $10 at my hardware store) rust within weeks, and are a pain to re-use after they rust. (Sometimes they're sold oiled to keep them from starting to rust right in the bag.)

johndoug, where do you get the stainless ones? Are they thoroughly non-rusting?

I'm sure, but not the kind that won't rust or bend, and are sharp and will give you endless years of reuse. I'm as frugal as anyone, but these are worth the money.

regarding changing the soil, it's the same idea as crop rotation. In one season the plant takes nutrients out of the soil at that spot. Also Pests for a plant lay eggs and some other bad stuff (bacteria, plant diseases???)may be in the soil. Same reason they say to throw out (and not compost) your dead plants in the fall. I don't know the science behind it.

I'm not sure I understand, you bought the expensive staples so you can reuse them, but don't want to reuse them?

Haha...not this year!

I just found the box. I bought them on eBay from palmetto golf. They are galvanized not stainless.

So you are asking permission to be a lazy gardener? I don't think you'll get it here :)

Seems like your idea of removing and replacing the soil would be a lot more work than removing and replacing some soil staples to amend your soil, idk.

The work required for a successful garden has to be done one way or another, now or later. I prefer to do great prep work up front in the spring weather. I have learned over the years that doing that saves me a lot of hard work later on when its 95+ degrees and 95% humidity in the garden. Do the work now so we can lay in the hammock with a glass of lemonade later. :-)

Dave

Thanks for the opinions guys. If it were just pulling up fabric I'd do it, but I have the many staples, probably 200, the extensive cages and trellis' anchored in. I might still take it up, based on the inputs I'm getting, so this is the kind of inputs i was looking for.

Plants "take nutrients out of the soil at that spot"? No, aside from nitrogen, which is hard to retain in any soil and helps to amend, the amounts of at least mineral nutrients that plants take out of soil is pretty miniscule. Again, we're all telling you we repeatedly plant the same plants in the same spots, and have no trouble. Now, I always plant peas in the winter where I plant cherry tomatoes in the summer, and that ought to amend the nitrogen. I also add some compost every year. But just a few shovelfulls for a whole 4x4 bed. As to disease, if you didn't have any, none will be in the soil. I ALWAYS compost my dead plants, unless they were obviously diseased.

No, you don't "use up" soil.

Soil benefits greatly from fresh organic matter added. Not because plants "take it out", but because it fully decomposes over time and the soil food web breaks down. JMO.

I'm curious about the 200 staples. Is this 200 staples just associated with the tomato area, or are you assuming that you'd have to lift the fabric for the whole garden because you don't want to cut it?

I regularly cut my fabric--I try to avoid it, but it happens moderately often.

I'm going to explain just because I wanna, even though I have no reason to think anyone cares: My garden is arranged in wide rows, six foot center to center, sixty feet long, with two foot paths between rows, so each row is really four feet wide of growing space. (Though to some extent I include the paths when calculating spacing.)

I have 3' X 60' (plus some slack for the ends) lengths of fabric, permanently stapled (roughly one staple per three feet), running down the paths between the rows. Then I have 6' X 60' lengths of fabric running over the rows--so that the path is pretty much entirely overlapped by the main row fabric. (And the path fabric intrudes six inches into the row, which is fine, because I never ever plant anything through fabric as close as six inches. My tightest spacing is eighteen inches, which works surprisingly well--bush beans just make huge bushes; onions can be planted in groups. Anything that MUST be planted closer than that, I put in one of the small number of un-fabric-covered beds in front of the garden.)

If I had designed the garden all in one fell swoop, I would have used a different row width, to avoid this extravagant waste of fabric. But the rows were already mostly established, and some perennials planted, a couple of years before the day I said, "I'm sick of weeding; we're going to buy a gazillion dollars' worth of fabric and violate its warranty!"

Each row is defined as being ten beds, each one six feet long and either four (if you exclude the paths) or six (if you include them) feet wide.

When I want to amend a bed or group of beds, and I can't lift the fabric due to a perennial or a crop in progress, I flutter around and grumble, and then give in and cut across the six feet and lift a length of fabric. (Using pliers to yank the staples out of the ground; works great.) Then I scrounge a patch, six feet by at least twenty inches, and cover the cut. Then I staple the fabric down using a stompable staple inserter. (Works great, but only with NEW staples. I have a big bucket of rusted staples that I'm not willing to use because using them involves kneeling down and using a mallet, and not willing to throw out because I keep thinking I'll use them someday.)

Right now, I only have one or two cuts on each row, but I strongly suspect that if the fabric survives, in a few years I will have a full ten cuts per row, every single one of them patched, so that I can lift any individual bed's covering.

If I were to set up nice permanent supports like yours, JohnDoug, I'd put them juuust outside the growing area, in the permanent paths, to allow me to still lift the fabric. I've been trying to sell my gardening partner on permanent posts, with nails or clips or something that would allow us to bend wire around them, or wind string around them, or do whatever the plant in question would like. He's not sold.

That was a lot of babbling. I'm done now.

Y'know, the "maintenance free garden" discussion in the trellis thread, combined with the fact that the discussion in this thread is in large part about tomato supports, made me think: I'm too lazy to support my tomatoes. So I don't.

One Early Girl, planted dryfarm-style, sprawling without support in a 6' by 6' space, with zero irrigation after a good soaking at planting, gave me more tomatoes last year than I could eat or give away. (I don't make sauce; I'm sure I could use up more if I did.) And it wasn't a fluke--in two previous years, I did the same thing with different varieties that I have, irritatingly, forgotten.

This year I plan to test the same method on seven more varieties. Based on past experience, I suspect that three or four will thrive, and the rest will die. The other factor is whether the tomatoes will be edible after sprawling on the ground. Early Girl are a smooth firm tomato that can take it; I don't know how others will do.

("Planted dryfarm-style"--get a tall skinny but healthy young plant, nip off all foliage except for a little tuft at the very top, dig a hole deep enough for the whole plant to sit upright, plant so that only that little tuft is peeking up out of the dirt, soak it deep after planting, and never water it again. Absolute weed control is required, which is why I only do this now that everything is covered in fabric.)

So if you want to lift your fabric, but you don't want to rebuild your supports, you could try sprawling your tomatoes. I don't know if it would work with regular irrigation or regular rains adding dampness to the sprawl, though.

This might be a good place to mention that plants feed from their root tips and the root system of a mature tomato plant can be quite extensive.

I am not sure how much soil is being replaced here or if it is really effective or worth the effort.

Some here might be interested (some maybe not) is this link from a 1927 publication covering a variety of plants.

<Mature plants have a transpiring surface of 70
to 100 square feet and a wonderfully extensive root system. Usually
15 to 20 major branches spread widely (maximum, 5.5 feet), have
very numerous large branches, which usually penetrate deeply,
and finally, turning downward, extend into the third, fourth,
and sometimes the fifth foot of soil. In addition there are almost
countless smaller main laterals. All are so profusely furnished
with masses of much rebranched rootlets that the absorbing area
is extremely intricate and extensive even beyond the working level
of 3.5 feet. A very large soil volume, beginning just beneath
the soil surface, is very completely ramified with rootlets.>

Scroll down for the tomato listing:

From this link ROOT DEVELOPMENT OF VEGETABLE CROPS

HTH

Incidentally, afaik, allowing plants (esp. tomato) to sprawl or otherwise contact the soil leads to more disease and fruit damage from more insects (including slugs) that might not otherwise contact the fruit, leading to more cull losses.

Not to mention trying to harvest from plants laying on the ground. That is more fun than I want to have.

Growing tomatoes (a vine) up a string is so much easier to see the fruit to harvest but you don't have to reach thru a wire or mesh to get at them.

I also prefer to trellis my cukes (up a string) . Not only are they so much easier to see and harvest but they tend to grow straight because they are hanging.

Edit: I explained earlier how I grow my tomatoes up a string and cut the stems off, leaving the roots in the soil at the end of the season. The larger roots may not be completely decomposed by time I plant again the next season. But will be gone by the end of the following season and I'm thinking they contain plenty of the very nutrients tomatoes like.

I apply compost to the planting hole and the top of the soil when planting then let the worms and rain move it where it needs to be.

Re: "Incidentally, afaik, allowing plants (esp. tomato) to sprawl or otherwise contact the soil leads to more disease and fruit damage from more insects (including slugs) that might not otherwise contact the fruit, leading to more cull losses."

You'd think so, and I wouldn't have tried it without feeling that it was blessed by some authority (Steve Solomon, in Gardening Without Irrigation), but there was not a flawed tomato. I suspect that it's dependent on the dryfarming and the summer drought--the ground (well, in my case, the landscape fabric) was too dry to easily generate mold or support slugs, and dryfarmed tomatoes tend to be denser and firmer. Also, the plant had enough space that it wasn't crowding into another plant.

Harvesting off the ground wasn't an issue for me. We'll see if I have less patience with it this year, with more plants.