This Is The Hands-Down Best Time To Plant Tomatoes If You Want A Fruitful Harvest This Summer

It is the seasonal dream: A backyard full of homegrown tomatoes for your caprese salad, flavor-packed bruschetta, and maybe even fresher bloody marys than you're used to. You'll tend to your plants with an old-fashioned watering can, talk to them to make them grow, and harvest your goods like a regular Barefoot Contessa. But you have to plant them first, and perfect timing is all that stands between you and those beautiful rouge fruits. And, depending on your approach, you might want to get to digging before spring even sets in.

If you are starting tomatoes from seeds the conventional way, planting them indoors to transfer outside later, you'll want to begin about six weeks before the last frost in your area. You can more or less predict that date using a frost date calculator from The Old Farmer's Almanac. For example, if the last frost is expected somewhere around April 3rd, as it's likely to be in parts of the east coast, you would want to start your seeds in containers inside sometime around late February. That gives them plenty of time to get good and strong for when that last frost has passed, and the ground soil has finally reached a consistent 60 degrees Fahrenheit for transfer into the earth. It typically takes roughly 100 days to harvest time, so you should have juicy, ripe tomatoes just ahead of the first days of summer.

It is terrifically fun and fulfilling to watch something grow from a tiny little seed that you planted yourself. But it isn't always practical. And much like semi-homemade is a whole genre of cooking, you can take a semi-homegrown approach to your garden, too. Just as you can use a store-bought rotisserie chicken to make something like a broth, you can take the easier route and buy tomato seedlings to transfer to the ground.

Using these seedling starters can still be a lot of work, as you still need to tend to the soil, find the best, sunny spot for the plants to thrive, and probably fortify them with something like poultry wire. A lot of the calendar consideration still applies as well; the seedlings can't go into the ground until after the last frost and a trend of 60-degree Fahrenheit ground temps. But this sort-of shortcut does buy you some time, as you only have to get started outside in the spring, instead of thinking ahead and planting indoors when there's still discounted Valentine's Day candy on the shelves. And the reward will be the same: tasty tomatoes nurtured with love, right in your own backyard.