4 Simple Ways To Trellis Tomatoes

I'm gonna share with you four different ideas for trellising your Tomatoes Tomatoes who are they and how did they get here tomatoes are one of our favorite crops but if you don't do any sort of training or trellising on them you end up with what I have here which really doesn't look like anything but this is actually a whole patch of just wild Tomatoes just falling along the ground you can kind of see in here I have semi ripe tomatoes that have fallen hons of the ground they got knocked off the plant before they even had a chance to completely ripen and this is just sort of chaos there's not much you can do with this so this is this is what happens when you ignore your tomatoes and don't trellis them meanwhile here in our greenhouse where we've done lots of work to keep everything nicely trellis nicely contained everything is ripening nicely it's very easy to pick easy to work with lots of production lots of fully ripe fruit we are in the greenhouse now so I'll show you the first way to trellis Tomatoes here we have a top rail in the greenhouse and we're running a piece of twine off of it down to the ground where I have it tied onto the base of this tomato plant and then as the tomato plant grows we twist the the plants the main stalk up the twine and then we make sure to prune off any suckers and then this keeps one solid plant growing up this technique works really well for getting stuff in really tightly the only trick with it is if you don't prune the suckers and bees here or suck that haven't been proved but without pruning these it can start to get a little bit more complicated you know this sucker here has some fruit on it you know they start to fall down they potentially start to drag down the whole tomato plant so if you aren't doing a lot of work for pruning and you know picking and maintaining your Tomatoes on a trellis like this this might not be the best option this has the most potential for you know growing Lots in a small space but it also takes the most maintenance this is a good example of the chaos that starts happening when you don't prune the sucker this is a sucker that's at the very bottom of the plant and you'd see how big this has gotten and it's kind of you know just overtaken into the greenhouse [Music] the greenhouse is great for doing the twine because you usually have the top rail across the greenhouse but using twine out in the field isn't quite as easy so what we've done is out here in the field we set up a trellis that were then running running a twine on same idea as what's in the greenhouse for how to maintain it but a little bit of a different structure because we're actually building afraid this is a really simple structure to put together this is like I think it was a 7-foot tea post pounded into the ground a couple feet a cap for running the top rail on chain-link fence and then just some chain-link fence top rail slotted into it this is then you know every couple feet another tee post with the cap and it works really well it actually makes this pretty good structure and then what we did is we had some logs to tie the twine onto and then we just ran the twine this structure of like the tee posts on the top rail is is something that you could then run any sort of trellising off of I don't know that we're necessarily going to do the twining out in the field in future years just because as I said about it in the greenhouse it is a little bit more labor-intensive but another technique for trellising Tomatoes that I can't show you because I don't have it this year but it works really well is if you have all of your Tomatoes planted in a line you can actually just take string and run it around the entire the entire row of tomatoes and just tying it off to the tee posts and up to the structure you can really quickly and really easily do a trellising system if you have you know a bunch of big beef steaks that don't necessarily need the pruning but they need a little bit of support a trellis structure like this is going to give you a lot lots of options for how to contain your Tomatoes one of my favorite ways that we use for trellising the tomatoes this year was this structure here what we have is some of those key posts just pounded into the ground and then we had some some fencing that was just left on the property I think this was cattle fencing so what it is is it smaller on one side and then bigger on another side and you know this is just simple and affordable but it worked really well for the trellising all we did was the plants as they grew we would slip them into the openings and then we just weave it up and if we had multiple branches coming off that we wanted to keep rather than going straight up we could go diagonally you know any anywhere there was an opening we could just weave it in to the wires so we still did some pruning we didn't have to do as much pruning it was you know this the system of cubes was there for us to work with they were close enough and tight enough that it went together pretty pretty good and this you know even though the fence itself isn't super strong it's been more than enough structure to hold up these Tomatoes and it's it's worked really well I've been really happy with this and then it's it's flat so it's easy to come and pick the one side pick the other side this this is a technique I think we're going to be using a lot in the future [Music] he's my favorite now the problem with all of these trellising ideas that I've just shared with you is they work great for me when I'm planting out 50 Tomatoes in a line but if you have a home garden and you don't necessarily have as too many tomatoes that you're planting on mass as I do this might be a little bit of overkill I don't know that you necessarily want to fuss around with fencing to snip you know a little 4-foot piece and pound in all these steaks and stuff just to trellis up a couple of tomatoes so let me show you my favorite technique for a home my favorite way to trellis Tomatoes in my home garden is with just the classic tomato cages tomato cages get a little bit of a bad rap okay but I think that part of that is just that you need to know how to use them properly to make it so they don't actually fail on you midseason they usually have you know like the legs that come down and then three you know one two three rings to use them what we do is we actually stake them so that the the bottom ring is sitting on the ground you need to stake it in quite deep because by the time the tomato gets big and tall it needs to support a lot of weight and you know if if all you do is have these little tiny pieces of wire two inches in the ground the tomato cage is just gonna topple right over and it's not gonna function for you so if you actually stick those you know wire legs down the six to eight inches that you have then it's gonna work a lot better another trick that we do is there is you know like the one dollar ones you can find in a dollar store and then there's the ones that cost like eight dollars each and they have a higher gauge wire and they're usually bigger it's worth spending the money to get the better quality tomato cages we've had our tomato cages for like ten years they live outside they're still going strong but those you know those cheapy ones that we've had those ones have been long gone they kind of only lasted a year or two to actually use the tomato cages is really simple as the plant grows you just make sure that it's in side inside the wire circles and then by the time it gets to the top you know if it's getting too out of control you just talk stop your plant from growing any more or another trick that we use is we stopped going growing vertically at the point that they reached the top of the tomato cages and we usually have our Tomatoes you know kind of like in in a square like for tomato cages and then we'll start draping the plants along along the top and they'll all kind of just run and keep producing with the tomato cages same as with the trellising the more you prune it the easier it's gonna be if you just have this big bushy million branch tomato it's gonna be hard to get into the middle but if you keep on top of them and you use the tomato cages properly I really recommend the just simple wire tomato cages for home gardens I I really like them hopefully that gives you some ideas on how to trellis your Tomatoes at home it makes a huge difference to put in the work get them trained up keep them pruned so I highly recommend you use at least one of these tricks but you know this is just what we have on our farm honestly I've seen dozens of different ways that you can contain your Tomatoes so if none of these seem like they work for you there's still an option for you out there you

Channel: You Can't Eat The Grass

Views: 118,053

Keywords: family farm, urban farmer, homesteading, urban homestead, you cant eat the grass, vegetable garden, gardening, permaculture, living off the grid, sustainable living, simple living, tomato trellis, tomato support, tomato trellising, organic gardening, growing tomatoes, tying tomatoes, cattle panel trellis, how to make a tomato trellis, staking tomatoes, stringing tomatoes

Id: eqsePmmeasE

Length: 11min 2sec (662 seconds)

Published: Fri May 22 2020