Did your tomatoes have any disease last year? If they did not, the grow bags should be safe to re-use.

Linda

Not sure though they got pretty sick a few weeks after the squirrels found them. I don't know if that was just squirrel damage or some sort of disease. By the end of the season there were a lot of brown drying leaves. I got a decent harvest from them, though. I was more worried about the algae or whatever it is.

I leave my garden bed soil out, sitting there in the elements all winter. Seems to work OK in the spring. But yes, fungal diseases such as blight, verticillium and anthracnose carry over with the soil.

I’ve been using 25-gallon smart pots for tomatoes for 10 years. For the first 5 years I emptied them out in the fall and washed them in the washing machine before filling with new soil mix in the spring. It was expensive and a lot of work to fill 10 pots. In recent years I’ve used the pine bark based soil mix recommended in the Container forum and only refreshed the soil mix with about 1/3 new mix each spring. I leave the pots with the mix in them outside all winter. Some years I cleared out the roots and loosened the soil in the fall and in some I waited until spring. I always add a new controlled release fertilizer with micronutrients at the beginning of the season and fertilize regularly every two weeks all summer. I’m still using most of the original pots. And since I started combining old mix with new, my tomatoes have actually been more productive. I still have to fight leaf diseases, but haven’t had any soil diseases.