String Method for Growing Tomato Plants - Part #1

[Music] welcome to another episode of peter's projects i'm going to talk a little bit about our garden and how we've decided to use the string method for growing our tomatoes this year in the past we've always used cages but after learning about the string method really was drawn to its elegance the neatness and the fact that you can grow more plants in a smaller area so with the string method as you might imagine you we are going to have the tomato plant grow straight up a single string to do that we are going to only keep one main stem and clip off all of the side stems all of the side growth which are called suckers so i'm going to show you that on a specific plant so the suckers grow out of where the main stem is and where the leafy branch comes out this is a sucker so if allowed to continue to grow this would become another main stem so we're going to go ahead and just remove that okay here's an on this plant here's another one this right here is another growing right out of that leafy branch so i'm going to go ahead and remove that so we do that on every tomato plant continually along as it grows so that there's only one main stem and it grows up this string wanted to give you an example of a sucker that's been allowed to grow for a little while so if you look at this plant here here's the leaf that has come off the main stem which is here and then out right at that intersection this is the sucker now this is a lot larger than the ones we clipped earlier i'm going to go ahead and clip this now one thing to note is if you have several of these on one plant these larger suckers that have grown to this size or more you don't want to cut them all at once it can be too much of a shock to the plant so we're just doing one at a time make sure the plant's fine and then go back in the next day or so and do it do another one all of the varieties of tomato that we have chosen are indeterminate so the plant is either going to be a determinant variety or indeterminate determinant varieties continue to grow until they're killed by frost so about eight or nine feet so we we made our trellis eight feet tall uh determinate variety of tomatoes this this method isn't as useful for um they only grow to three or four feet so you don't get get the benefits of having this long string of growth in addition to removing the suckers we've also removed the lower leaves and this is for a couple different reasons first by removing the lower leaves the plant um there's there's less potential for disease and then secondly the leaves that are below where the fruit grows take away and take energy away from the fruit production so we all we obviously want to have as much energy put into the fruit themselves so we've removed the lower leaves as for the trellis itself we build it ourselves just decided to try to use something really simple we decided on half inch electrical conduit that comes in ten foot sections it's really cheap it's only about three dollars and fifty cents at home depot for a ten foot section so it works well it also can be flattened very easily either using a vise so you can see either a vise or a hammer so these two sections are flattened and then that way we can we can drill through it and just bolt the sections together so this has worked really well for us it's an inexpensive solution that seems to work well once we had this actual structure in place we placed the strings about 12 inches apart and then we were ready for planting we've done we've done some plants you can see these taller ones that are almost as tall as me these were about um planted about five or six weeks ago and then just a week ago we planted additional seedlings so we're trying to kind of spread out our pr our harvest so that we'll get tomatoes earlier with these plants and these will continue on longer so that's how it's going so far we're really happy with the results and we're looking forward to eating our tomatoes thanks so much for watching if you have any questions about this method or about what we've done in the structure itself feel free to leave them in the comments and we'll go ahead and answer them to the best that we can and happy gardening [Music] you

Channel: MileStone Sprinter Van - Peters' Projects

Views: 188,894

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Id: pX2VikGndyM

Length: 5min 21sec (321 seconds)

Published: Sat May 15 2021