Yes and no. Succession planting tomatoes does not work the way it does for fast crops, but you can still spread your harvest with a smarter method. The honest answer is that the every-two-weeks resowing trick falls apart with tomatoes. So you should plant several types at once instead of sowing the same plant over and over.
Think about how a radish bed works. You can resow radishes every week or two and pull a fresh batch all season long. They mature in 25 to 30 days, clear out, and free up the soil for the next round. A tomato plant is the opposite. One plant sits in its spot for the whole season and keeps cropping for months, so the tight resow trick has nowhere to go.
The timing is the real issue. Most tomatoes take 70 to 85 days to ripen their first fruit, and then they crop for weeks or even months after that. If you tried to set out new plants every two weeks, your later batches would run straight into frost. They would never get the heat and daylight they need to finish, so you should not bother resowing on a tight cycle.
Tomatoes are warm season crops, so the calendar boxes you in. You plant them after the last spring frost and pull them at the first frost in fall. That window is fixed, and in most regions it runs four to five months. A second sowing in midsummer would push fruit past the end of the season. You would watch green tomatoes sit on the vine and never color up.
Here is the method that does work. Plant two or three varieties with different maturity dates all at the same time, right after your last frost. This is the real way of succession planting tomatoes. Extension programs at WVU and UGA both point to the mixed-maturity method. Early types ripen first, mid types follow a couple weeks later, and late types round out the season. You get the staggered harvest without fighting the frost.
A simple plan looks like this. Pick one early type such as a small slicer, one main-season beefsteak, and one late paste type for sauce. You set them all out on the same day. Each one hits its peak at a different point in the summer, so fresh tomatoes keep coming for weeks. Make sure each variety has a different days-to-maturity number on the tag. Two early types will just ripen at once.
This gives you the same payoff people want from succession sowing without the season fight. You get a long, steady supply instead of one giant flood of fruit in August that you cannot eat fast enough. It also spreads out your canning and freezing work, which is a real win if you put up sauce. A wall of ripe tomatoes in one weekend is a lot of pressure on your kitchen.
If you garden where summers run long and hot, you do have a little more room to stagger. Some growers in warm zones set out a small second batch of fast, early varieties a few weeks after the first. You should still keep that second batch to early types only, since they need the least time. For the fine detail on spacing those plantings, see the how often question below, which covers the intervals in depth.
So skip the radish-style resowing for your tomatoes and use the variety trick instead. Pick two or three varieties with spread-out ripening times and plant them together on the same day. That one choice gives you tomatoes from midsummer right up to fall, which is the real goal behind the question. Succession planting tomatoes comes down to mixed varieties, so try it with one early, one mid, and one late type this year.
Read the full article: Succession Planting: A Complete Guide
