We recently bought some large and mature (already budding) tomato and bell pepper plants from costco. Unfortunately they have 3 to 5-ish plants per pot, and I'm trying to figure out what to do with them.
Are they intended to stay in their container for the remainder of their life over summer? We would like to transplant to our garden, but it seems like they would experience a lot of shock at this phase in their life, especially if we have to separate the plant roots from each other.
If we do transplant, any tips on how we would go about separating them without shocking them too much? There are plenty of articles out there on transplanting (although those are usually seedlings), but not a lot on separating mature veggie plants like tomatoes and peppers.
Edit: We got "Husky Cherry Red" tomatoes and "California Wonderful" bell pepper plants, and we live in zone 5b, 6a (Denver).
Image from here