Tomato Planting Tricks for Cool Weather

When spring is dragging its feet or the weather's warmed up but you just can't trust it to stick around, here's a handy trick before you commit to putting heat-loving transplants like tomatoes and peppers out in the garden.

Keep those pepper and tomato plants, along with other heat lovers, in black plastic pots—or even black garbage bags if that's what you've got. Set them out in the sunshine during the day and tuck them under cover at night. The black plastic soaks up the sun's warmth and heats up the potting soil inside, keeping it significantly warmer than the ground and encouraging your young plants to keep right on growing. Just keep an eye on moisture—with that extra warmth and any breeze, you might find yourself watering every day.

Once both the weather and the soil have properly warmed up, go ahead and transplant them into the garden.

Image:"Tomato Plants" by HitroMilanese - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.