Vegetable · Solanaceae
When to plant tomatoes
The crop most often lost to a late frost. Start indoors well before your last frost, but do not plant out until night temperatures hold above 10C.
Start seed indoors
6 weeks before
Counted from your last spring frost.
Plant out
2 weeks after
Counted from your last spring frost.
Days to maturity
60-85
From planting out to a first picking.
Those weeks become real dates once you name a place.
Timing, in frost-relative terms
Seed packets rarely give calendar dates, because a date that suits one latitude is wrong at another. They give offsets from the last spring frost instead, and those offsets are what make tomatoes plantable anywhere.
- Start seed indoors 6 weeks before the last frost.
- Plant out 2 weeks after the last frost.
- Expect 60–85 days to maturity, counted from planting out.
Getting the timing right
Six weeks of indoor growing produces a stocky transplant with a first flower truss forming. Starting earlier than eight weeks usually backfires: the plant becomes leggy and root-bound, and gains nothing on a plant sown later.
Frost tolerance
Tomato foliage is damaged at 0C and killed outright at about -1C. There is no recovery from a frosted plant, so the transplant date is the single most consequential decision in the tomato year.
Classified as tender, with damage expected below 0°C (32°F)32°F (0°C).