I'm new to the forum. Last year I grew all of my tomatoes (15 plants) in buckets (homer and lowes) and they did pretty well - but man that was a lot of tomatoes for a family of 2 :-) This year we redid our backyard and built a 12x4 raised bed. It is ready to go for planing.

I was originally planning to scale down to 5 tomato plants and put them in the raised bed (along with other plants) but I have started to do some reading and am concerned about bacteria and issues raising tomatoes more than 1 year in the same soil. Of course, I could grow them this year and not worry about it for the next few years..

I'd love some input/experience.

Am I destined to be bucketgirl forever ??

Millions of home gardeners have no way or room to rotate their crops and do just fine. Otherwise we would all be stuck in the buckets.

Of course if you can rotate, even move them over to the other side of the bed on alternate years, great. But as long as you amend your soil really well between seasons and maintain good garden hygiene there are few problems. Many of us garden in the same spot and have for many years with no issues simply because we add lots of high quality compost to our beds 2x a year. The beneficial bacteria in good compost goes a long way toward elimination of the bad guys in the soil.

So what you need to be reading about is soil amending, composting, and proper soil maintaining. The Soil & Composting forum here is a good place to start.

And if you will type 'crop rotation' in the search box at the bottom of the forum page you'll find many previous discussions to read too.

Dave

I talk to people all the time who feel compelled to have the perfect tomato plant. I don't worry about perfect. IF the leaf has spots on it, pinch it off and dispose of it.

Spraying chemicals just adds to the cost of the tomatoes.

Got tomatillo's??

Happy Gardening - I love spring in Phoenix!

I won't be rotating much, if at all, since I'm primarily growing greens and tomatoes.

Where in zone 9 are you? I have horrible results with buckets, but I'm lazy and forgetful. Not traits conducive to successful container gardening, especially in Houston!

Niallalea,
I'm in San Jose, CA. I have never grown tomatoes before, so I couldn't compare. But I had great luck. I have almost too much sun and some of the fruit seemed to get burned or bleached. My raised bed is in a little less intense area of the yard. Here is a picture of the home bucket garden! I used 1/2 potting mix and 1/2 manure compost, some fertilizing on a regular basis with fish emulsion and ? I think something else, cannot remember. I had tomatoes through to November almost.