How To Stake and String Tomatoes and Tomatillos with the Florida Weave

when I first started growing tomatoes I used tomato cages and they worked great but the more I learned about growing tomatoes the larger my plants got the larger my harvests got and the larger the Tomatoes gotten before long they were toppling over those flimsy little cages so for the past 12 years I tried dozens of different systems to find what was going to work best to support these large indeterminate tomato plants and I'll say that every single one of them has worked better than those flimsy little cages but I've also found that there's not necessarily one perfect way for everyone in fact there's just a few ways that work very well but the best one for you depends on your own scenario i'm kyle from urban farmstead and in this video i'm going to show you the tomato trellising system that i'm using for our garden this year and i'll also talk about a few of the systems that have been very effective for me in other gardens in the past years [Music] of course I'm going to show you exactly how I'm setting up this floor to weave system for our Tomatoes this year but before I talk about this I want to talk about a couple of the other systems that I've used in the past have worked very well for me because this isn't the perfect system for a tree garden so I just want to mention a couple the other ones first so recently what I've been really enjoying is the lower and lean system or a modified version of it basically you take a string and you hook it to a lateral support now these are called Toma hooks it's an actual spool of string so what you do is you attach your tomato plants to this string either with hooks or just wrapping them around once they reach the top you spool out a little bit more string you lower and lean them to the side and this is a very popular process for farmers to use when they're growing in a hoop house or a hothouse environment when you get a really long season really tall or long plants so lower and lean system on strings works awesome another system I love is just staking your Tomatoes so you can grow your Tomatoes next to a stake like this you have to do a lot of suckering removing those suckers and you basically just tie it to a single post that way you're able to grow them really close together there is a lot more work because you're constantly coming out and cutting off the suckers but I've got really good crops with this and it's a nice clean way to do it the third one is trellising your tomatoes so you can put your tomatoes on a cattle panel hog wire trellis like this straight up the trellis or I really love to make arch trellises out of this basically these come in 16-foot lengths this is an eight-foot section because I cut one in half you can bend this over and the tomatoes will come up and over this trellis so I love using these hog wire panels to trellis our Tomatoes those are three of the ways that I really like I also like just making large custom tomato cages so using a wire like this or a concrete wire to make a large custom tomato cage rather than those flimsy little cages because they're going to get big but this year I'm using the Florida weave system so now I'll show you how I set this up the materials I'm using for this project are t-posts redwood stakes and string I'm using 8-foot t-posts for the tomatoes 6-foot T post for the tomatillos the Redwood post will span between the T posts and for string you can use something synthetic like this or a natural twine the only tools I'll need are something to drive in the T posts which you can also use a sledgehammer if you have one of those and something to cut the string [Music] [Applause] [Music] now I'm gonna run this straight from post to post here and as I said you can use a synthetic string like this that will last really well from season to season through weather or you can use a natural twine it's really your choice another option is using this PVC pipe as a tool now for a short span like this in just a few beds I'd probably just use this as it is but I'll show you a trick that a lot of the farmers are doing in order to run really long spans of this through their fields because if you just have a spool of string in your hand you're doing a lot of bending over and for these 12-foot beds four of them it's not a really big deal but we're talking about farmers doing hundreds of feet even you know potentially miles of tomato plants so basically you just run the string through this PVC pipe and I'll show you how well this works I'm gonna go a couple inches up I'll do a couple of round turns a couple of half hitches you can do an overhand knot if you don't know a knot tie a lot you know goes right there at the base now I'll bring this string around this side I'll do one loop around this center post nice and tight any down this side another loop there I'm going on the other side single loop tighten up and that's it couple more knots a couple half hitches for me whatever you want for you we'll keep doing the other rows so normally I would start to string my tomato plants like this when they're about half this height so I'd only do one run initially then as they grow I continue to do it about every eight inches but since I waited so long to string these I'll show you exactly what I would be doing you know two-week progressions two weeks six weeks whatever every time they grow anywhere from about 8 to 12 inches you want to do another string of it now this time I'll show you how to do it without that stick because again it's not an essential tool but it's also just a PVC pipe so if you happen to have one sitting around use it if you don't have one don't use it unless you have a long span to do and then go get one it's like a buck [Music] so that's it literally this is all I'm doing with every single one of these rows you can see how simple it is you can see how few the materials are like this cost less than probably buying a bunch of tomato cages and it will be so much more effective all right this is my tomatillo bed now tomatillos have very similar growing habits to tomatoes they like to branch out a lot they can get really tall or they can just scroll all out over the ground coming to you is our one thing I've actually never seen growing at a farm obviously they're growing a lot of farms all over the world but I'm not sure what farmers typically use to support them do they use Florida weave systems I don't know I'm going to use a Florida weave system this year I've used different systems in the past that have worked well but I think this is gonna be pretty effective for them so I'm going to set up the same way my t-posts at the ends are a little bit shorter even though these things are going to get pretty tall as you can see they're already the same size as the tomatoes I'll keep you all updated on how well the Florida weave works for come with us [Music] as these tomato plants and tomatillo plants continue to grow this summer I'll continue to add extra layers of string every 10 to 12 inches to meet their height but for now that's it for this Florida weave system now this is not the perfect tomato trellising system for every garden but it's what I'm using this year and I think it's going to work very well for my scenario now if you have any other questions about the Florida weave system or any questions about any other tomato trellising system that I've used feel free to ask them in the comments below if you enjoyed this video give it a thumbs up and if you want to see other videos like this hit subscribe otherwise I'll see you all next time [Music]

Channel: Urban Farmstead

Views: 374,726

Keywords: Garden, gardening, homegrown, vegetable garden, urban farm, DIY, how to, organic, organic gardening, farm, farming, grow your own, start a garden, garden tips, gardening tips, grow food, grow vegetables How to trellis tomatoes, trellising tomatillos, better than tomato cages, Florida weave, basket weave, string, stake, tomato farm, tomato sucker, prune tomatoes, tomato maintenance, how to grow tomatoes.

Id: NnTGFhXWAsk

Length: 9min 20sec (560 seconds)

Published: Sun May 10 2020