I have a 8×4 bed I was going to plant some sweet 100 cherry tomatoes and banana peppers in but the nursery sold the plants in 6 packs and I'm not one to waste so now I've shoved 6 tomatos 6 peppers and 6 marigolds in this planter.
I don't mind if this lowers my yeild a little as I'm sure this will produce more than I'm going to eat but will they still grow okay? Or should I thin them out?
by Cuntwaffle92
26 Comments
The haters will tell you it’s a bad idea, but I say full send. I’m big into intensive planting.
It depends. Are you going to be disappointed if you only get a couple peppers and a handful of cherry tomatoes?
You can absolutely grow stuff like this for fun but if you’re trying to get enough to can or freeze for later, this isn’t ideal. If you’re just having fun? Do it!
Sweet 100s are an indeterminate tomato.
This means you should trellis them up as high as you can (6′-8′). You only need 3-4 in that much space.
It’s probably a horrible idea, but I understand your dilemma LOL. I’d prob do the same.
Well … The tomatoes could easily smother the peppers, starve them of light until they give up. And then there won’t be enough airflow, and the tomatoes will suffer from mildew or blight or some fungal thing. If they don’t, they’ll pile all over each other so much you’ll never see the army of tomato worms devouring your plants.
So that’s the bad stuff that could happen it probably won’t, and I think you can make 85% of these plants fit as long as you tie up the tomatoes – they are gonna be huge.
Tomatoes like to have 2′ x 2′ of space. That could be 4 plants along one long edge. Then the peppers could be along the other long edge. Maybe you’ll get lucky and find someone to trade 2 cherry tomatoes for 2 eggplant plants. 6 Cherry tomatoes is a LOT of cherry tomatoes. I personally hate the 6 packs because people want variety. And instead they wind up with too much of one thing and zero of another thing they wanted. I’d rather see those 6 packs seeded with 2 cherry, 2 slicer, and 2 novelty colored tomatoes (yellow, blue, black, striped, whatever).
What is your end goal? I am a prepper meaning that I try to plant for all the things that I would need if there was an apocalypse. You have a lot of good information given to you so far so use that and then try to come up with a good final plan.
Without going crazy with fertilizing, you will only get so much yield regardless of how many plants you jam in there.
Your peppers aren’t going to stand a chance against tomatoes though. You may get a few.
If it were me I’d at the very least get some grow bags and move the peppers to the grow bags.
But at the end of the day there is only so much pH sunlight, water and nutrients available in this bed and your yield will likely only be a little bit lower than if you’d planted 4 tomato and 2 pepper plants. Disease could change that though since it’ll be so crowded.
Get them pruning hands ready.
I’ll preface by saying I’m a huge proponent of throwing plants away if you have too many and that probably a sacrilegious thing to say on my first post here, but I think you can make it work if you have a plan and prune aggressively. The biggest potential pitfall I see is support for the tomatoes. If you have a strong support and can get them going vertical, you can instantly prune to the first fruits on the tomatoes and give the peppers some room. That would be my focus. I grow 6-8 tomato plants, 50+ carrots, and tons of basil in a bed that size, but I have a cattle panel bisecting the bed for support and they do wonderful. They’re also grown in 100% compost and I amend heavily with oyster shells every year, so nutrients and blossom end rot are no longer a problem. As for the peppers, they like having friends, so no problem there, just make sure they’re getting enough sun. Just my thoughts.
Here’s my last year’s patch with similarly spaced tomatoes, marigolds, basil and parsley. If you can’t see the marigolds, basil and parsley it’s because they probably didn’t exist by this point. I don’t know, I couldn’t see through the jungle. There are 30 tomato plants in there, btw. The harvest was good, probably around 300 lbs tomatoes from the outer plants. As I later discovered there was about as much in the middle, rotting on the ground, which I only found in November when I pulled the plants.
https://preview.redd.it/zjzoo9n4y7zg1.jpeg?width=3522&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3343c560bc235c641db598091a13cde8b190c891
RIP to your peppers. The others will thrive though. I’d pull the peppers out and pot them! Or pull one just so you can see the difference
I’ve put 8 indeterminate tomatoes, 8 marigold, and 8 pepper plants in the same size bed. They thrived.
I’d plant the marigolds outside along the beds so that you can separate the tomatoes from the peppers a bit more so the tomatoes don’t spill into the peppers. I do 5 tomatoes in 4X4 with great results, so I’d remove one — the middle one might prove hard to access once they’re grown. The peppers should be fine if you keep them from getting crowded by the tomatoes; for banana and other similar peppers, I have no issues planting one per one foot square.
The key will be healthy soil, though, since you’ll have a lot of plants fighting for nutrients.
It will be okay! (I have done 11 indeterminate tomatoes in an 8×4 plus cosmos and parsley down the sides). But you need to do a couple things:
– move the marigolds to the corners to give the peppers and tomatoes more room
– watch the direction of the sun. It will need to come from the left side in the morning (over the peppers) and move to the right. If it goes the opposite way then you need to switch where the peppers and tomatoes are so the peppers don’t get completely shaded out. If it comes over top/ the middle then you should also be fine
– the cherry tomatoes will be 8-10 ft tall by end of season. Buy 8 ft tall stakes and plant Velcro to tie them up
– fertilize with fish emulsion and an organic granular fertilizer so they can grow and not deplete nutrients super fast
– prune the tomatoes to 1-2 main stems
– you could consider doing 2 rows of 3 peppers only 12 inches apart so the tomatoes have more room. I’ve fit 20 peppers in an 8×4 and they do really well. They can be very close
– consider moving the tomatoes in the middle row to the edge so you have 2 sets of 3 along the edges, it will be very hard/ impossible to reach into the middle to harvest those without a ladder or climbing into the bed
I have 5 Better Boys in one 4 x 8 bed. Today they were touching each other. Tomatoes just making.
Well…you wont have to walk to far to find a pepper or a tomato.
We have planted them on schedule by the book and we have packed them in there and the results are always the same.
Go for it and let us know the results! Gardening science!!! Good luck, friend!
The waste in the middle is the issue. I’d leave a path thur the middle. You didn’t have any disease issues but you will if you don’t have any good air circulation.
So I would never grow multiple cherry tomato plants, because just one is enough to burn me out on them. You should add some slicers. You should also remove all but 2 of these. You just don’t have the room for this many plants.
Look, I had about 50 cherry tomato plants each in two planters this size the last few years. They grow like weeds, and I was picking a 2 bucketfuls a day towards the end.
Hopefully you have full sun or close so the plants can dry out properly after rain, pruning can be helpful for air flow, get or make trellises, and pick every day!
😂 1 sweet 100 plant can feed my family of four for an entire summer. 6 can feed an army.
That’s facing looks great for the peppers. It’s pretty tight for the tomatoes. If you put in sturdy cages then the plant will be healthy but the real challenge will be accessing the plants in the middle. There’s also higher risk of mildew if that’s a problem in your area.
Prune prune prune
I love over planting for leaf-only harvests…lettuces, kales, chards, etc. In the case of tomatoes and peppers? I think you’ll get the same yield in the end as if you planted just two of each.
Epic gardening had a video about this, except with cabagges. Basically the soil has the nutrients to give you the same amount of produce, no matter the spacing. You’re going to get the same amount of tomatoes as if they had proper spacing, just spread out between the plants. The peppers are going to have a hard time as they wont get as large, youll need to prune the tomatoes so the peppers have a fighting chance.
So, what I would do is single-stem them. It takes a lot of upkeep but you’ll end up with enough space.
You get furring strips, 8-10′ in length. Stake them into the ground now, close by each plant. Buy some elastic thread on Amazon, and tie the main step to the post/furring-strip every 5 inches, or so.
The problem is you need to keep popping off the “suckers”. I would checkout MI Gardener’s YT page for how to on this. Your plants will want to split a bunch, so it’s a full-season commitment. But if you keep each as a single stem, with about 8″ of ventilation at the bottom, you’ve got room for that many tomatoes PLUS the peppers.
I usually do a 4×8 bed of about 18 tomatoes. And that works just fine. I don’t do more than two cherry-sized, and they are different varieties, but that’s b/c I like lots of different tomatoes for different needs – snacks, sandwiches, sauces.
I also do a 4×8 with about 15 peppers, plus a couple zucchinis. That is harder to maintain, because once they get going, they want to bush out. The peppers I use normal ring-supports for.