Tomato Companion Planting Plan

We previously completed our Corn Companion Planting Plan.  That accounts for 2 of our 7 soil beds.  Now we need to complete our Planting Plan for our tomatoes.  Almost every home garden sports tomatoes.  It's the most common vegetable people grow.  One of the nice things about tomatoes is that they vine and as such we can leverage trellising to take advantage of vertical growth in order to maximize yield.  Research has indicated that asparagus, carrots, celery, cucumbers, onions, parsley and peppers are all good companions to tomatoes.  Since asparagus is a perennial crop (it doesn't have to be replanted every year), it would be relatively fixed in location.  As such, it's not a target for our crop rotation beds so we'll scratch it off the list.  Remember I mentioned carrots go well with most crops.  We'll include carrots with the tomatoes.  The kids love their celery sticks, but I have a plan for celery with the broccoli bed so we'll skip celery with the tomatoes.  Given that cucumbers tend to vine as well, we'll skip them so we only have to deal with the tomato vines in these beds.  Onions is always welcome so we'll include them in the tomato plans.  Garlic repels spider mites from tomatoes so we'll plan on planting some of those around our tomato beds as well.  These choices led to the following Planting Plan for our tomato squares: 

The red circle is of course the tomato plant.  Orange triangles at NE, SE, SW and NW are carrots.  White triangles on the west and east are onions while the green pentagon clusters at the north and south are spinach.  Each little square in the background grid represents 1/2".  We decided to go with cherry tomatoes since they make wonderful snacks in their small size.Using this plan we should get the following yield from our garden.

Tomatoes (cherry), 55 days to maturity, row planted at 18" intervals, yield 600 lbs / 100' row.  At 12" intervals, there would be 1 plant per feet of row.  Since we are using intensive gardening techniques, we actually have 1 plant per square foot rather than 2 per 3 feet.  Our chosen variety of tomato is different from something like corn that ripens and then must be replanted.  Sakura is reputed to keep producing all season long.  That being the case, we'll just plan a single crop.  We will see how this works out.  If the plants do not continue to produce, depending on time, we can always pull them up and replant new ones.  Thus:

1 crop X 1 rows per square ft X 6 lbs/ft X 96 square feet = 576 lbs of tomatoes.

Onions, 110 days to maturity, row planted at 4" intervals, yield 10 ounce bulbs.  Thus:

1 crops X 2 plants per square ft X 96 square feet = 120 lbs of onions.

Spinach, 39 days to maturity.  I don't actually have crop yield numbers so we'll just capture those number this year as we go.  Suffice it to say, spinach is excellent in fresh salads.  With such a short DTM we'll just keep on replanting spinach as we harvest and employ some season extension techniques at the end of the growing season to help bring the fifth and final harvest to maturity.  Thus:

5 crops X 18 plants per square ft X 96 square feet = 8640 plants.

Carrots, 56 days to maturity.  Unlike the corn, we'll produce 3 crops for the season.  Considering a 2.5 ounce average weight for the carrots, yield would be thus:

3 crops X 4 plants per square ft X 2.5 ounces (0.15625 lbs) X 96 square feet = 180 lbs of carrots.

Seeds required for the two beds:
Tomato - 96 X 1 X 1 = 96 @ 100 seeds/pack = 1 pack X $27.80 = $27.80
Onion - 96 X 2 X 1 = 192 @ 1000 seeds/pack = 1 packs X $5.60 = $5.60
Spinach - 96 X 18 X 3 = 8640 @ 1000 seeds/pack = 9 packs X $3.95 = $35.55
Carrots - 96 X 4 X 3 = 1152 @ 250 seeds/pack = 5 packs X $3.95 = $19.75

Now we need to determine the planting dates for these.  According to the Purdue University Agricultural Extension Service's Indiana Vegetable Planting Calendar, the earliest we can plant our tomatoes outside is May 5th, two weeks after last frost.  The reason for such a late planting date is the tenderness of tomato plants.  Frost is a killer for tomatoes so in order to avoid frost, the planting data is pushed back.  If we're going to use the 50% Last Frost Date of April 18th, our plants will need some protection.  This is where season extension comes into play.  There is a lot of information out there about starting tomato seedlings indoors.  The Old Farmer's Almanac recommends starting the tomato seedlings indoors late February to early March and then transplanting them late April to early May.  Given the 55 days to maturity of our variety, either the Johnny's site is wrong or the Old Farmer's Almanac is referencing another variety of tomato.  This is where we're going to have to got with a gut feel.  I no expect a plant to grow more than half it's life inside so I'd say starting seedlings indoors 4 weeks before transplant of this variety, should be the goal.
Using the Purdue date and counting back 4 weeks, we should start our seedlings on April 7th indoors.  In order to stagger the transplanting effort, we'll stagger the seedling starts as well in the same manner we did for the corn.  This will result in our seedlings being planted indoors over a 24 day period.  The seedlings will germinate in 65F soil but would much rather prefer 85F soil temperatures.
After we harvest the tomatoes, we'll keep an eye on them and see how they keep producing.  There may not be a set schedule after the first harvest so it may just be a daily thing of walking through the garden and harvesting any ripe tomatoes we find.

The onions is only going to deliver one crop for the season.  According to Purdue we have a range of March 15th through April 15th to plant the onion seeds.  That's a 32 day range so we'll shave evenly off either side and start seeding on March 19th.  Given the 110 DTM, our first harvest of onions will start on July 7th.

The spinach has an earliest sowing date of March 20th.  With it's short 39 DTM, and a latest sowing date of September 10th, we'll be counting on at least four crops over the course of the season and if we use season extension and protect our plants, we could even get a 5th crop in October/November.

The carrots has an earliest sowing date of April 10th.  Due to our staggering out the planting over 24 days, our third crop of the season won't fully be in the ground by the last planting date of August 1st.  Given that the carrots are in the same beds as the spinach which we'll give some season extension protection, we'll be able to complete the harvest in good time, even before the final spinach harvest.