Trellising Tomatoes
I was out recently pruning my roma tomatoes, which you may recall were the only tomatoes to survive the tree squashing the garden. They are growing on a trellis that was on the end of the garden that went unsquashed.
I always try to get in a good pruning during the first half of September, as we start to gear up for the end of the season. In another couple of weeks, I’ll go out and cut them back even further and try to force the plants to ripen those last tomatoes.
Anyway, I’m not always good about pruning off suckers through the summer, so this autumn pruning can be a real chore if the plant has grown huge. And, once again, I was reminded how much I like growing tomatoes on a trellis, because it makes this pruning job so easy to do.
If you’ve never grown tomatoes on a trellis, I wholeheartedly recommend you try it next year. I read about it in an article on small space gardening a few years ago and trying it once made me a believer. If I had room, I’d grow all my indeterminate tomatoes on a trellis and I’m seriously relooking how much trellis space I’m willing to give up next year to put towards the tomatoes.
To start, your space requirements go way down, because you only need 1 square foot of space to plant a tomato. Then, as the tomato grows, you get to enjoy the convenience of never having to stake the plant. You just feed it up through the holes in the trellis. The way the plant grows then makes it really easy to prune and to harvest.
We use netting that’s said to hold up to 60 pounds of weight and it supports the full plants with no problems.
BTW, once we got past the blossom end rot, the romas this year were fabulous. I grew Mama Rosa, one of the larger varieties and am about to put a ton in the freezer for winter cooking. Maybe it was because we had no other tomatoes ripe in the garden to enjoy all summer, but we thought our tomato mozzarella salads were some of the best we’ve ever had!
September 12, 2012 - 12:12 PM
I am definitely going to try trellising next year. My tomato plants got huge this year, especially the roma, and I didn’t keep up with the pruning so some of the fruit was shaded. I have a privacy fence along the garden edge so I’m going to use that next year.
We planted late and I let my tomato plants grow wild this year. I didn’t cut back any of the new plants that popped up and it has actually turned out really well! Looks like crap, but i’ve gotten more tomatoes than I ever have. You do lose a few stepping through the tangled vines but the overall end result was good. Why did I let them grow wild? I’m a terrible gardner in that I hate weeding and always put it off. It got crazy fast and I decided to just go with the flow.
Not trying to steal any type from your board KH, but a good discussion is going on over at Kevins board on frost/freeze dates. It might save you some time if the question is asked. These should be questions we ask over here, but all weather related, so one place is as good as the next.
Late blight finally caught up with my 64 tomato plants this week but my canning shelves are about full so it is time. Traditionally, w’ve used metal fence posts and staked each plant. Now that I have to drive my own posts,I plant 4 tomatoes between posts. As the vines grow, I wrap used baler twine between posts and keep the vines tucked in. I let the vines grow a bit more and add another round or two of twine. This is strong enough to support the vines and takes very little time as long as I keep adding more twine in a timely manner. At cleanup time, I burn the twine along with the plant stalks and don’t have to take time to untangle the mess of vines from a metal trellis.
Deep Roots, I thought of you when Karen wrote the article about trellising. I think we will try that next year with our tomatoes – we did run out of tomato stakes this year. The only tomatoes left in our garden are the 3-4 volunteers that we just left to grow all over the ground – no staking.
Yes, wd – frost dates are approaching. I would say that we have about another month before that.
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