Tomato plants can survive the winter! They are perennial plants with a long lifespan in their natural tropical habitat.
In colder conditions, many tomato plants perish in the winter since they are intolerant to frost.
For this reason, many gardeners grow their tomatoes as annual plants, planting them in the spring to avoid the risk of frost, then harvesting them during the growing season and uprooting and composting them when the freezing temperatures kill them.
However, with some effort and know-how, you can keep tomato plants alive and produce fruit for years! Below, we’ll look at everything you need to know to keep tomato plants alive during winter.
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How Can You Help Your Tomato Plants Survive The Winter?
When you’ve put in a lot of time and work to grow productive, healthy tomato plants during the growing season, it’s heartbreaking to see them fall victim to falling temperatures and frost.
If you would like to avoid this annual occurrence, you must first understand how important timing is. If you wait too long to start overwintering work, you lower your chances of success.
We recommend preparing to overwinter around a month before you expect the year’s first frost. When frost occurs, it will all depend on where you live.
While not everyone has a greenhouse, most people will have a basement, garage, or a windowsill that’s exposed to the sun, and these make great homes for your tomato plants during the winter.
Preparing Your Tomato Plants For The Winter
Monitor the weather forecast carefully for about a month before you expect frost to arrive. If the frost arrives sooner than expected, losing your tomatoes to the freeze is easy, and you’ve missed your chance to overwinter them.
It’s better to begin overwintering your tomato plants sooner rather than later and be unpleasantly surprised by the cold weather!
You can prepare your plants by ensuring they are well-watered for a few weeks before they begin their transition. Meanwhile, get rid of any diseased leaves and keep an eye out for insects.
If you spot aphids, caterpillars, whiteflies, or other destructive bugs, get this issue sorted before you begin the overwintering process.
If your tomato plant grows in a raised bed or the ground, you must dig it up and move it to a pot. Make sure to use new, clean potting soil and attempt to get as much of the root mass as you can.
Keep your pot on a patio or outside porch for 7–10 days, and ensure you regularly irrigate it. If your plant is already growing in a plant, then that makes your job easier and you don’t have to worry about transplanting!
How To Overwinter Tomatoes Inside Your Home
Tomato plants can survive the winter, but they do have particular requirements. The biggest drawback to this method of overwintering is that tomato plants kept indoors need plenty of sunlight.
While you can place your plants on a windowsill with plenty of sun, they likely will survive the winter with just a few measly leaves, even when placed on the most sun-drenched windowsill.
We don’t have long winter days in the Northern Hemisphere, and the sun in winter isn’t strong enough to provide tomatoes with sufficient light. This is where a grow light comes in.
Luckily, there are a lot of budget-friendly, small, and well-made grow lights out there.
Lamp-style models can be placed on the floor and tucked away neatly, while an LED shelf grow light is ideal if you’re overwintering many tomato plants and they’re of a smaller variety.
We recommend keeping the lights on for 18–20 hours a day. Keep an eye out for pests, which will be drawn to indoor tomatoes and may sneak into your house on the plant’s foliage.
When spring comes, you can gradually return your overwintered tomatoes to your garden by slowly increasing their time spent outside every day over a two-week period.
Now, you can plant them in the garden, trim their height by half, and regularly fertilize and water them. It gives you a bit of a head-start during the growing season and allows you to preserve your favorite tomato variety every year.
What Tomatoes Need To Survive Year-Round?
If you want to keep your tomato plants alive all year, there are two main factors to consider.
The flowers of tomato plants are self-fertile, but for these tomato flowers to grow into fruits, you need to shake loose the pollen inside the flower.
When tomato plants are outside, bees and the wind take care of this, but this is now your responsibility in a greenhouse or home without pollinators.
Hold a cheap, electric toothbrush against the flower stem below the bloom’s base. Hold it there for around 3 seconds and repeat this for 3 consecutive days for each new blossom.
While tomato plants can survive the winter, you are partially responsible for whether they produce fruits.
If you have sufficient light, fruits may develop on your plants, but many gardeners have found that fruits don’t often naturally ripen indoors because the conditions aren’t quite right.
We recommend picking the fruits when green and speeding up the ripening process by placing them in a paper bag containing a cut apple.
This is because the apple gives off ethylene gas, a natural plant hormone that boosts the ripening process.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) on Are Tomatoes Perennials?
Q: Are tomatoes perennial or annual
A: Tomatoes are considered annual plants. They are typically grown from seeds or transplants and must be replanted yearly. Although they can reseed themselves in some cases, they are generally treated as annuals due to their sensitivity to frost and colder temperatures.
Q: Can tomato plants survive the winter?
A: Tomato plants are not frost-tolerant and will die off in freezing temperatures. However, in areas with mild winters, they may survive and produce fruit for a second year.
Q: How long do tomato plants live?
A: As annual plants, tomato plants typically live for one growing season, which lasts from planting to the end of the harvest. However, in some cases, they may live longer if they are grown as perennials.
Q: Can tomato plants come back every year?
A: In some tropical climates, tomato plants can grow as perennials and produce fruit year-round. However, in most areas, they are grown as annuals and need to be replanted each year.
Q: How do I overwinter tomato plants?
A: To overwinter tomato plants, you can dig them up and transplant them into pots, then store them indoors in a sunny location. Alternatively, you can cover the plants with a frost blanket or row cover to protect them from cold temperatures.
Final Thoughts
We hope our article has answered the question ‘Are tomato plants perennial?’ and provided you with some valuable insight into improving the longevity of your tomato plants, even in the frosty winter months!
While your home isn’t the ideal place to grow tomatoes, it can make a nice second home for them during the winter.
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