if you don't turn the soil the tomato seeds stay under. and if you bury the scraps deep enough the pathogens will not spread. I avoid the problem entirely and only bury scraps in beds that, being in part shade, never grow tomatoes anyway.

I toss my scraps in one of the beds that either... had tomatoes the previous year; or have tomatoes this year. I then rotate and don't plant any of the family of plants to which tomatoes belong. In my garden so far, that means no tomatoes, eggplants, or peppers for at least 4 years.

It's an interesting question whether or not burying them will allow the spores to live. Some fungal spores can go dormant and last a VERY long time. I'm not sure about those which tomatoes host. For many pests and diseases, the idea is to till often and allow oxygen, cold weather, and biology to 'clean' the problems from the bed.

If you get good decomposition, then it's more likely the viruses could be rid of than some of the fungi... from my understanding, they need host plant matter to survive. Unfortunately, they can host on nearby weeds of the same family, so it's not always a 'clear cut' case that any action will work. If you try it, the best defense is a very active, living, breathing soil that would aid in the decomp of the plant matter and diseases.

I think it would be helpful to know which pathogens we are talking about here.

afaik - some would be better off sent off site or even burned. Others may be wind blown and nothing you can do to prevent them, as in futile.

<Does burying pieces of garden tomatoes pose a risk of spreading pathogens through the garden?>

The blight that crawls up from the lower leaves (early blight?) seems to be the biggest complaint at least where I live. It lives in the soil and is splashed onto lower leaves by rain. It lives on leaves and not in fruit (as I understand it). So: 1) you can't make the problem worse by burying waste if it's already in your soil, 2) the way to fight it is with mulching and by spraying the lower leaves with anti-fungals early in the summer. I think you'll be just fine with the trench composting.

off topic, but only a bit.

I once was treated to a tour of the Houston waste water processing plant's sludge treatment area.

It was a dismal, overcast, gray day, with dark, threatening clouds.

The very air looked gray.

Everything looked gray.

Except the sludge drying area, which had brilliant red tomatoes growing everywhere!

Digging a hole and burying food scraps is trench composting, it is not necessary to dig a trench. Burying the years tomato plants does pose a risk of burying diseases of tomatoes, if the plants are infected. Other members of that family, potatoes, nightshade, peppers, etc. pose the same risk, if the plants are infected.

However, making the soil into a good healthy soil, as well as crop rotation, does help control plant diseases.

kimmq is kimmsr

<Except the sludge drying area, which had brilliant red tomatoes growing everywhere!> LOL, stil lamo

Tomatoes grow like weeds in my garden. I don't mind cuz they seem to be healthier and require less watering likely because the roots have never been disturbed as I do NOT transplant them.

Kinda like Cracker Jacks tho (who remembers those?) cuz you never know what kind of tomatoes you will get until the fruit develop.

Call it the Lazy Man's Gardening Style.

obtw- I've grown tomatoes in the same beds for over 15yrs now.

Blight is a big issue here in Washington DC, so tomatoes are the one plant I do not compost - they go straight to the garbage bin when done.