More tomato talk

I can't tell you how glad I get to see information as well received as the tomato post from yesterday has been! That's really the best part of blogging and it's the reason I drag my butt on here every night.

Don't sweat asking the follow-up questions Eric, really, you guys make my life easy when you ask me about something. It's hard sometimes to think of what I want to write about day to day and when I have this kind of great interaction it makes it easier on me and I think it's really helpful to see all the other opinions and ideas out there. I also sometimes don't know if there's any interest in the particular topic I'm writing about so hearing the follow-ups or asking for more, like Steph did, let's me know we're onto something. That's the greatest strength we all have online is the power of the collective and of the interplay of our ideas and lessons learned, don't you think? I'm also glad to have gotten to hear from a couple of new folks through this process. Glad to have ya!

So then, inspirational talk and blushing out of the way....check! On to business.
Steph, I did a little search and came up with a couple of really good links to help you visualize what I'm talking about with the indeterminate tomato plant pruning:

The first one is a great page all about pruning tomato plants. I don't tie mine up like they do, but there's no hard and fast way to do this so give it a read. Additionally, Kory I totally agree with what you added in the comments section about pruning up the bottom most leaves. This article touches on that. Not spreading disease is a good point as well, hadn't thought of that.
http://www.finegardening.com/how-to/articles/pruning-tomatoes.aspx

This page is a pdf provided by the Colorado state extension Master Gardener program that goes into all kinds of information on Tomatoes. It is VERY good information!
http://cmg.colostate.edu/gardennotes/717.pdf
For all of you that said that you were planning on modeling trellis after my framework system, this pdf has some great illustrations of trellising methods that could easily apply to mine. In fact, one of them, the fan trellis is not one that I've ever seen before, but could potentially be adapted to that trellising system. (On that note...If any of you DO get similar set-ups put in place this year send me a couple of pics so I can show them off to everyone OK? Don't be shy.)

Now, in an effort to kill two birds with one answer, jc and darren had to kind of related questions. jc asked if I would grow tomatoes in the same method as the beans, and Darren wanted to know what happens when they reach the top of the trellis. Yes, j.c. I would and in fact WILL do it. All I'll need to do it add one more cross piece to the top section, centered on it, and then run the strings down to the bottom. When the vine has reached the top, well...it goes over the top to be simple about it, or I train it along the top or yeah I would prune it off. The later would certainly be the case if it were late in the season and I wanted to ensure the fruit that had already set had the energy in the plant used to ripen it before the first frost.

On a final note, Eric asked if I had any more thoughts on planting shade tolerant plants in the shadow of the larger ones. I do, and I think it would actually take a little writing so I'll go into more detail soon. In the short-term however, and in the interest of making sure no one waits too long take this answer. Plant the shade/cool tolerants during their regular season but do so taking into consideration of where the larger plants will be growing later. The shade tolerants will be OK in the shade on a summer day, but need the full sun now while it's cooler.

More to come on that later. Thanks for the great input.
Paul~

Answer to the tomato question

Well I asked you to ask and Eric took me up on it. His question was this:

I'm curious about your tomato growing method. I think you planted your tomatoes close together (1 ft) and used your trellis system for support. What have been your experiences with growing indeterminant tomatoes in this fashion? Can you talk a little about pruning specifically for your growing method?

Well Eric, here goes. Yes, I do grow my tomatoes in very close proximity (1 sq ft), and yes I am very big on trellising. Too leave it at that would be making the process too simple though, so let me explain. In the pictures above and below, there are two sections of tomato trellising. The one above is the box that is in the back, the one below is in the box in the middle in case you weren't sure. This is last years trellis that I tried out. I didn't like it, and am modifying my framework trellis system to have a center beam that I can hold tomatoes on for this year, but this illustrates the method just fine.

I do grow the tomatoes in 1 sq foot of garden space, but I have thus far only grown indeterminant plants and they take to this very well. Generally speaking a tomato plant can grow just fine in 6 inches of soil in a square foot but the reason they don't is because if they're not trellised they require greater rooting space for structural support for themselves. With the tomato plant trained to a trellis, the support needs are met and the plant just needs to grow. This reduces the space needs of the roots. For training the tomato to grow up, I use a rebar stake that I notched with a hack saw and tie a string to. I stick it in the ground right next to the root ball and then tie the string up to the top of the overhead beam, whatever that is. As the plant grows, it naturally gets "leggy" at the topmost part. As this get's long enough, I just gently wind it around the string which stays in place. You don't want to weave it too tightly or it will strangle the plant, just let the plant know where the string is and guide it around. Here's a close up of one of my San Marzano plants and you can see the string with the plant wound around it.Now, here's the caviat. This works well for indeterminant tomatoes because they have a natural vineing tendancy. Determinant tomatoes do not. They are more naturally inclined to bush and produce a lot of fruit for one harvest than to continue to crank them out over time. This year we are going to grow a good selectionof these types as well, and I will not be trellising them. At least not like the other ones. I may work out a loose cage type thing or something, but I am not going to worry about them getting tall. It's not in their nature.

As for pruning them, I do make sure to prune them pretty consistantly. This isn't directly related to trellising, at least not in that I need to do it to get them to grow up or anything. The reason I prune is to maximize the yield as well to limit exposure to diseases. The basics are to pinch off all suckers. (These are usually the branch looking stems that crow out from the crotch formed by the leaves and the stem. They rarely set fruit and if they do it is usually inferior. Secondly, I trim off any old or dying leaves or leaves that touch the ground. Many of the blights and pathogens that tomatoes get, come from soil contact. There's a lot of good resources online if you'd like more info.

I hope this at least points you in the right direction Eric.
Good luck to you!
P~

A Better Trellis - part two

After my last post about "building a better trellis" I had a couple of questions that I wanted to take a minute to address as well as to share a couple of other options that I've used.

Wife to 1, Mom to 5~ liked the look of the trellising system that I wrote about, but needed a little more detail on how to grow her tomatoes.
Here you go:
This picture was taken in the '08 garden in August. It's helpful in this circumstance because it allows to you see the new framework system as well as my typical single frame tomato trellis so I can point out the differences.

The raised bed in the front is growing green beans up the twine while the raised bed in the rear had two varieties of tomato's. The single frame is made of electrical conduit and is approximately 6 - 6.5 foot tall. You can see that by August the tomato plants were already grown up and over the tops. I should add that these are indeterminate tomatoes, not determinant. The difference is that indeterminate tomatoes lend themselves better to climbing and trellising than do the determinant ones. In my previous post I showed this image: This is basically a hybrid of the single frame's tall single post to tie the twine to, with the ease and stability of the square trellis system. This is what I will be doing this year. I tied the strings to the bottom beam and then ran them up over the top beam and tied it loosely. (not too.) I place a string in the center of each square foot up the middle.

As the tomatoes grow all I had to do was gently guide them around the strings that I had tied in place. The tomatoes will naturally want to climb, they just need some support. One thing I may do is rather than tie the strings to the top of the center beam, I may tie it to the outer top beams so as to allow the tops of the vines to grow out onto them. Stay tuned in a couple of months for even more detail. For now, here's a close up of some San Marzano tomatoes growing up one of my string trellises. Pruning and training allow the plant to focus on producing tomatoes rather than plant vegetation.
Bill~ asked me at what interval I planted my green beans and how far apart are the twines? Here you go bill:
For beans and cucumbers, which are the two crops that I used these trellises for this year, I spaced beans at three plants per square foot. I alternated plants, zig-zagging along the bottom of the bed and trained the plants to grow up the strings that I had tied at approximately 6" intervals. For my six foot deep raised beds, I was able to plant 18 plants on each side of the center beam for a total of 36 plants. For cucumbers I planted them straight in line at two per square foot inline.

On the sides of the beds this year I grew onions, zucchini, herbs, a wild tomato, and carrots. I think any plant that can stand a little shade will be fine though.
And that brings me to Wendy~ who made the comment that she could see covering these trellises with plastic as a make shift greenhouse. Well, Wendy...There you go, These work very well for that as single frames, but I see no reason that they couldn't work fine as the square
trellises either.

My whole point in designing these trellises was to try to come up with something that I could modify easily and that would be versatile enough to be used season after season. They seem to have fit that bill so far I think. I look forward to hearing about your experiences with it!
Till next time.
P~

Building a better trellis

Hi all!! I'm taking the easy way out tonight and sharing a slightly modifies article that I wrote and have shared on different days on the two other locations where I regularly contribute. (Grit Magazine and Simple Green Frugal) I know many of you may have come here as a result of my writing there, and in fact may have read this post previously, but my regulars here that might not "get out much" :) haven't had the chance to read it so here goes... (Maybe you could check out some of my older posts?)

In my garden, I use a sort of variant of Square Foot Gardening. It works well because of the fact that I only grown on approximately 4-500 square feet. My biggest difference is that I generally like to keep things relatively informal. Part of my logic behind this is that I like to "leave my options open" so to speak. I've found that in the garden, as with many other parts of life, if you follow too many rules, or perhaps guidelines is the better word, by doing it the way that the "experts" tell you to do it, you run the risk of missing the opportunities and flashes that are possible through experimentation.

One such "flash" came to me early last year and I went with it. The result, I think, is one of the best from any of my gardening technique trials that I've had and I thought that with a lot of people just starting to try and figure out what their gardens will look like this summer it was a perfect time to share it. What it is, is a trellising system that allows me to use my 4 x 6 raised beds in many different configurations depending on the crop that I wish to grow there that particular year. In doing so, it also frees me from the chore of having to rebuild or move trellising apparatus every year, or worse yet every season, because it can be quickly tweaked to serve my needs. I've built one over each of my 4x6 beds and can either set it up as needed, or ignore it altogether and use the beds as though there were nothing there at all.

I put together a couple of renderings of the basic structure to give you an idea of how it's built. The ones I have in my garden were made largely from recycled 2x4'sthat I ripped in half to make 2x2's, although I did have to purchase a few. I joined them very basically with long grabber screws (course threaded.) and some corner triangles for strength.Basically, it’s just a cube that’s been built on top of an existing 4x6 raised bed. The image above is of the system in a straight configuration. Across the bottom of the raised bed, I ran a piece of 1x2 scrap wood that I could tie twine off to and then ran that up to a third top piece that I added. You could actually run the string out to the edge pieces to support the top of the plants when they reached above the top of it as well. My beds are 6 feet deep so I would run one string in the middle of each sq foot to support, for instance, a tomato plant. Here's another way of setting it up that I'm calling the "V-configuration". This was the original catalyst for this whole experiment. The reason I did it, was to try and solve a problem that I continually had with growing my pole beans. The issue I was having with conventional ways of doing them was that in my raised beds I either had to only grow one row per bed so that I could easily get to them, or I could grow them in a grid which inevitable turned into a nest of vine in which I couldn't find the dang beans! Also, in a four foot wide bed, I had a hard time reaching in easily to access the beans. I could get them, but always felt off balance. This "V-configuration" was developed to grow the beans on the inside of the bed allowing the edges to be used for other plants and, as they got taller and taller, to bring them out into my reach for harvesting from the side. It worked great as you can see here.OK, not the greatest picture of me... but the beans look good right? I have a small wheeled garden cart that I can sit on and could actually just sit down and slide along the paths as I picked. It was perfect.

I also made another version of this that ended up as a sort of "Double-V Configuration".Some of you may remember something that I tried this past summer to make a little different use of the space around my plants another way. You can see on the top of the bed here that there are two 1x2's holding the strings down. In the space between them, I planted a crop of carrots just after my cucumbers had come up. They grew there with plenty of sun initially and since they are cooler weather crops, did just fine in the shade from the larger plants. I will say that I should have planted them earlier than the cukes to have gotten better results, but it's a method that I'll definitely try again!

Interestingly, there are a couple of additional benefits to this system that I hadn't even thought of. Wind tolerance for instance. We get some nasty micro-bursts during the summer storms here and I've had problems with single frame trellises getting blown over from the force against the large plants growing up them. I watched my beans getting blown around severely with this, and yet lost not a one of them! In fact, I noticed later that some of the strings had broken from the force, but since the vines reached the tops of the frames, they no longer needed the strings anyway. Also, the frames can be used to support either shade cloths for the hotter climates or tarping to protect from frost and hail in other climates.

So there you go, my way to build a better trellis. I've tried to come up with some cool catchy name for it, but have come up short. Any suggestions, I'd love hear them. Also, if any of you decide to give this a try, I'd be honored if you'd email me a picture or two, I'd love to see how you're able to suit it to your own needs.

Till next time everyone...all the best!
P~