Can I Plant Bush Early Girl Tomatoes With Sweet Pepper Plants?

Early Girl Tomatoes

• If you want an early harvest of the most popular garden vegetable in the United States, setting out Early Girl tomatoes fills that requirement. Taking less than 60 days from transplant to harvest, Early Girls are the earliest full-size tomato variety available. Early Girl plants are resistant to the verticillium fungus, have compact, bushy growth and thrive in northern climates that have shorter growing seasons and cooler-than-normal summers. Early Girl plants make good companions for a variety of sweet peppers.

Sweet Peppers

• Garden aesthetics is a good reason to plant your sweet pepper plants alongside your Early Girl tomatoes. Early Girls load up with blooms within a month of transplanting, while the earliest bloom time for the earliest sweet pepper variety is approximately 45 days. If you plant sweet bell peppers, they take 70 days from transplant to harvest --- longer if you wait until the full-ripe stage. Since your tomatoes set fruit and ripen within 54 days of transplant, planting one beside the other creates an ongoing display of multicolored ripening fruits, and you'll still have brightly colored peppers to harvest long after the Early Girls have stopped producing.

Companion Planting

• Tomatoes make good companion plants for peppers. The tomato plant's pungent aroma creates an offensive barrier for some common garden pests, thereby protecting the longer-maturing pepper plants, especially in the early stages of growth. Since aphids can wreak havoc in any garden, consider interplanting garlic or chives with your tomatoes and peppers to ward off these destructive garden pests. Other valuable companion herbs for peppers and tomatoes include basil, marjoram and oregano. These repellent herbs protect your garden from mosquitoes, flies and hornworms, and several work well as integral ingredients in theme gardening.

Theme Planting

• Create some gardening fun by laying out theme gardens that not only make it easier to harvest by locating all recipe ingredients in the same part of the garden, but also makes a great conversation piece whenever you get together with your gardening friends. Planting peppers and tomatoes in the same part of the garden creates the basis for a salsa- or sauce- or even an ethnic-themed garden. Add some hot pepper plants to your Early Girls and sweet bells, plant cilantro, try growing celery and set out onion sets, and you'll have a ready-made salsa garden sequestered in a convenient corner of the garden. Add some Roma tomato plants to your foundation plantings of Early Girls and sweet peppers and tuck in garlic and other herbs to match your favorite sauce recipe, and you'll end up with a readily accessible sauce garden. Since your basic garden consists of vegetables consistent with Italian cooking --- tomatoes and peppers --- why not add basil, eggplant, oregano, garlic, thyme, onions and rosemary to create an Italian garden with all the components of Italian cooking? Other theme plantings might include edible flowers or garnishes for your favorite dishes.