This Technique of Tying Up Tomatoes Will Change Your Life

what's going on growers jeans because you only coming to you live from Jersey today I want to show you how to tie in prune your Tomatoes I believe this technique will change your life when it comes to growing tomatoes I know it did for me let's go right here is a tomato trellis that I've just built and as you can see we've got these strings tied to the top about eight or nine feet high and then run all the way down to the tomato we're then attaching our tomato to the string the ideas that we're growing vertically saving space avoiding fungal issues avoiding pest issues disease issues and also making it a lot easier for us to harvest so what we're doing is we're pruning these tomatoes to grow up a single stem I've got a new technique that I can't wait to show you this year so I'm really excited about it before I get into the technique that I'm going to be using this year to tie in my tomatoes I want to share with you a few of the techniques that I've used in the past and also share with you one super important thing this method for tying up Tomatoes for pruning and staking this is for indeterminate varieties of tomatoes this is not for your determinate varieties ones like your Rutgers the Rutgers tomatoes and other determinate varieties are going to produce all their fruit all at one time and then they're not gonna produce any more fruit again that's perfect for things like canning and for making pasta sauces but not for what we're doing we want Tomatoes they can produce all year those are your indeterminate varieties so up until the frost kills them they're gonna grow and continue to produce fruit so we want them to grow up one single stem these things are gonna get massive this year I'm tying Tomatoes up a string like I just showed you but in the past I've always just tied my tomatoes to a steak like a piece of bamboo right here that I just get locally I've got a friend that hasn't and I just grabbed it for them for free so what we do is we put the stake in next tomato you want to put the steak in before we put the tomato in then we just prune the tomatoes so it's growing up one single stem and then tie this to the stake so what were you use to tie the tomato to the stake is important we don't want to use a thin piece of string because that can cut into the tomato if you want to go cheap like I have in the past just cut a shirt a piece of cotton shirt that you have and then just tie that to your tomato what you want to do is first tie it to the to your stake around like this make sure you get a pretty nice tight tie to the state because you don't want it sliding up and down on you so we'll tie it tight to the stake like that and then we'll take this and tie it around the tomato and then back to the steak like this what this is gonna do is make it nice and strong but we're not tying a knot around the tomato because we don't want to squeeze the tomato and prevent it from expanding in the future so that's one way to do it one easy way one cheap way if you want to make it a little easier on you what I do now sometimes what I did last year actually was I got this tomato velcro so this stuff is pretty cool I got it an off season one year and I got it for super super cheap so I picked up like five things of it but I'm not really been using it anymore and this is the same technique basically what you're doing here but you don't have to worry about cutting the string you can just take this velcro put it around the tomato and tie it to your stake just like this so the first year I did this the second year I did this and now I'm switching things up even more when it comes to growing your Tomatoes up a steak I've had good luck in the past but there's been a few issues that I'm trying to avoid I think that's why the string is gonna look perfect so one of the main issues I've had is pushing these steaks actually deep enough into the ground to make them strong because these tomatoes are gonna grow like eight or ten feet up once they get tall and heavy then the steaks seem to try to start bending over like this and it looks really messy where you have just steaks leaning over one on the other so I think the string is gonna help me avoid that so before I move you over to the string I wanted to show you this tomato well that we were working on you'll notice like I mentioned we want it growing up one top so we want to remove the suckers this right here is a sucker you'll notice the on topper its unfolding there's even some flowers coming there and this top is unfolding so we want one main stem that it grows up so that means we only want one top so we have to remove this top this top is already bigger than I want it to be to remove it you want to make sure we can remove the tops with our hands we don't want to be cutting them off so if I move to the tomato plant that's right next to me here then I'll show you how we could just really properly be removing them with our hands so this one right here we're gonna show this is the top of the tomato here there's an additional top right here that's trying to unfold we want to remove that that's the sucker so we'll take that off with our fingers just clip that right off and then we can we move down the plant wherever you see these crotches a lot of times the suckers will want to come out so when they're that young and that's small that's when we want to remove them because if we continue to remove all these suckers the plant is going to continue to grow up one single them and we'll just keep following it up it'll show basically to fan leaves and then a fruit set to fan leaves and then a fruit set so we'll get keep getting fruit going all the way up the stem even though I've had success growing my Tomatoes up the stakes in the past I'm still not happy with it I know that mean talk can get better and I think this system will help us a lot it'll make it easier on us I think it'll give us bigger harvests because our plants will be so stressed out from leaning over and everything that comes with that all the time so let me grab some of these peas because I bet tuck wants a few and I also wanted to stop and grab a little snack tuck want a little snack boy Chucky I know he's around here somewhere he's always hanging out in the shade and stuff at this time because it's just it gets pretty hot so he's digging holes like usual but today he started to dig a hole underneath the blueberry bush so that wasn't cool we didn't want that but one tuck snack is snacking on this I'm gonna go over and grab some raspberries because those are so good so we'll let him have that and I'm just gonna grab a couple raspberries over here to show you one of his holes too this is a variety of raspberry that I'm keeping another another everbearing raspberry that I'm just focusing on that spring harvest and you can see the size of the hole that tuck dug under there so this guy likes to cool himself off so he's like scatter these throughout the garden probably not a good thing but but you know that's life and he enjoys himself and we have fun out here too let me bring you over and show you though this technique that I'm super super excited about and actually go into detail of just how we're tying these Tomatoes up this year the first method I want to show you for a time these Tomatoes to a string has to do with only just using this string here so if you're gonna just use a string for tying your Tomatoes you want to make sure that you've got some twine so the twine is important because you can see how stringy this twine is here the tomato is the same way it's got those little strings and hairs on the stem so I think that it kind of helps grip it better there's almost this level of like friction or something that's created where it grips up on itself so if you're going to use this string what you want to do is take the string and tie it around the base of this tomato we want to make sure that we're not tying it tight around the base that we don't want to strangle the tomato so it's a nice loose knot here just like that you see we got a nice gap there then we're gonna twist this around the tomato so I'm just gonna go under this leaf here work my way up and we're not gonna twist this thing you know a thousand times around the base of the tomato it's going to continue to be twisted as it goes up so it's gonna get some strength as it moves up so this is also better to do if it's mean it wasn't so large but I'm just doing it for demonstration purposes for you guys you know go around here up here and then we'll just continue this pattern where we're just twisting and you'll see as we move down the stem that uh that it's not twisted in a thousand spots but that's going to show good strength and then as we move up we'll see that it's not super super tight but it doesn't have to be super tight because we need to make sure we're continuing to wrap it around but this is a good strength right there you can see as a as a wind blows it's going to hold the tomato off just like that but this isn't the actual technique that I'm using this year I'm doing something much easier much more efficient and I think much better I'm using these tomato clips so let me show you how to show you how to use these they're so simple can be done with one hand we're just going to take this clip and the back locks into the string like that it holds it and then we could just take one hand and clip it closed like that so giving it and it locks in so it doesn't slide up and down the string then if we want to take it off we can just unclip it with one hand - so nice so efficient so simple so just like the other tomato we have there string trellis to the top and instead of tying this around the base of our tomato and twisting it we're gonna use these clamps one reason I don't want to twist it around the tomato is these Tomatoes can get really heavy and we don't want a girdle and strangle the tomato so we're going to pull the string down pretty tight we're gonna clip that string in the back just like that and then put it around the base of the tomato just snap it in and these clips they lock in the back so it keeps their clip from moving up and down to the string so we're going to move up another six inches or so and just follow the same thing and what I'm gonna do is I like to put these clips basically right right underneath one of these fan leaves because they're gonna the weight of that family might lean on it and kind of help hold it up and one thing I wanted to show you is as we move up this base and this in the plant continues growing like this this family right here at some point it's gonna drop down to about ninety degrees right now it's at a sharper angle so we don't want it we don't want to put this clip right here and keep that family from dropping down so we want to put the clip just right below that leaf after we attach to the string making sure that as this leaf goes down and forms more of a 90-degree angle this clip can help hold it up so you'll notice down here this leaf as I move down see these leaves are more of a 90-degree angle that's what's gonna happen typically more time so we don't want to prevent that from happening you'll notice that like how quick and easy that was let me bring you over to another one right here so as these continue to grow up like this one you can see that I've put some clips too at the bottom it's so easy to come out here and just take this off you know these are our suckers take this next sucker off grab our clip put it around this string and then go right around the base of our tomato so that is so quick and so easy to do we're going to continue to do that another thing I love about the clips is as this plant starts to get really heavy we'll also be able to drop it down a little bit because we put extra string at the top so if we drop it down a little bit that'll bring the fruit to a nice nicer level for harvesting and allow our plants to technically get even taller because we'll save some space and these clips when you drop the plant down sometimes they'll like they'll lose some of the weight so there's no weight actually bearing on the clip you could take the clip off the bottom and use it back at the top so I think that's super cool and it's super efficient that you can reuse them they're not that expensive either I think it was only like like $16 $15 for 150 of them and if you want to get him an even bigger bulk they're cheaper I I'll put an amazon link so you guys know which ones to get I bought two different kinds to try out which ones I like better one kind I really like the other kind I didn't like it as much it felt cheaper made and it didn't they didn't unsnap as easily so I think this is really the good one I'll put the link in for you there's a few more things I want to mention before I let you go one is if you're gonna go with the prune steak method or tie your Tomatoes to a string anyway your trellising them and you live in a super super hot climate like I don't know Florida or Texas somewhere where it's really hot make sure you leave a couple of those suckers next to your fruit because these suckers can shade out the fruit and make it so it doesn't get some blistering and doesn't get some Sun scald on the fruit what you don't want but if you live in a location like me don't worry about that as much because you want those tomatoes to get a lot of Sun because that helps increase the vitamin C another thing I want to mention is a little tip a little secret when it comes to identifying hornworms on your tomatoes so now is the time of year when some of the pests are going to start coming out you want to make sure you're on top of them and getting those hornworms before they do any damage a little trick right here we have a dill plant so this dill plant is going to attract the hornworms most likely before your tomato plants so you put a couple dill plants in and then check these regularly because on the tomato plants the tomato hornworms they're really hard to find but they're quite easy to see on these dill plants so make sure coming out and checking your deals regularly to make sure you stay on those tomato hornworms one more thing I wanted to mention about the tomato hornworms if you ever have that tomato hornworms and they've got these little white things on the back of them leave that leave that tomato horn beat leave it as it is because essentially on the back of those are little wasps larvae wasp eggs and those will hatch and then help protect your garden so make sure you're not removing all pests at all time unless you do your homework first that's today's video roars thanks for watching I hope you enjoyed it I hope you got something out of it I hope you take the chance to get out there to try to stake here tomatoes this year and prove them I think it will change your tomato growing life it definitely has for me it's so nice to go out there when the tomatoes are growing up that nice trellis and just walking out grabbing a tomato off the vine as opposed to you know digging around the ground looking for a tomato in the mess when they're all you know in the dirt and everything that's not for me that's not how I want to do it do you guys enjoy the video hit the like button hit the subscribe button share with your friends don't forget to check out the merch down low and don't forget whenever you're on Amazon use our Amazon affiliate link to start your shopping it won't cost you anything and it gives us just a little piece me and tuck way back to with another one real soon we [Music]

Channel: undefined

Views: 849,471

Rating: 4.9125509 out of 5

Keywords: gardening, tomatoes, tying tomatoes, how to tie tomatoes, how to prune tomatoes, pruning tomatoes, tomato trellis, how to trellis tomatoes, raised bed garden, self sufficient me, james prigioni, logan paul

Id: GBDqskBk3lQ

Length: 12min 43sec (763 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 13 2020