Heart Of the Home

Today I thought I’d spend some time talking tomatoes. And trellising. There are three ways to manage tomato plants. Caging— putting a circular support around your tomatoes and allowing them to bush, staking— using a central stake to support your plant, and trellising— pruning them to vine up a trellis. We have always preffered trellising. Here’s why:

• Trellising allows you to plant your plants closer together, thus improving your yield.
• It allows you to reach and monitor the tomatoes better, as they are more visible.
• It transfers more of the plant’s nutrients to the tomatoes, rather than to leaves.

It is a bit more labor intensive. I have discussed earlier how to create a trellis frame for your garden. When you have it in place, you simply take a ball of twine or other light cord, tie it of near the base of one side of the frame,and draw it across to the base of the other side of the frame. Wrap it around once, then head back across at a slight angle. You should arrive back at the first side of the frame about 9-10 inches above your original knot. Wrap it around once again, then head back across. Repeat until you get to the top of the frame, then tie it off. You will need some vertical supports. I do two, each 1/3 of the way across. Tie off at the top of the frame, head down to the first horizontal string, then wrap your vertical string around it. head down to the next one and repeat. Do this until you reach the bottom, then tie off. Below you will see the wrapping technique, and the finished trellis.

You can then begin feeding your tomato (or cucumber or pea) plants up through the trellis. Now for the  controversial part–pruning. Some are aghast at how radically I prune my tomato plants. But remember, you just need enough leaves for the creation of chlorophil. What your tomato plant really need to concentrate on is—wait for it–creating tomatoes! The leaves you want to remove are those that are especially large. My father used to call those “sucker leaves”. You want to remove them at the base, being careful not to remove any juncture which may produce a blossom or more vines. You can either pinch them off, or use scissors or pruning shears. I usually just pinch, because fingers are a tool you always carry with you. Below, you can see a before and after pruning moment.

Remember, you want to find a balance between pruning and leaving enough leaves for the continued health of your plant. In the future i will post pictures as they grow to demonstrate pruning. The red flashes you see in the pictures to the right are called tomato trays. You insert them at the base of your plants to help regulate the amount of water that gets to the roots. This helps to prevent blossom end rot, which we had some trouble with last year.

Well, that’s about it for this time!See you all next installment.

In this section we will discuss spacing of your plants, and how to accomodate them. Needless to say, different plants requre different space needs. This can be achieved through planting or thinning. Let’s start with those requiring the most space. This would include your vining plants, like squash (summer, winter, and zucchini). The require a space 3 squares by 3 squares, or nine squares total.

Some plants will require two adjacent squares. These include watermelons, cantelopes,  pumpkins,and smaller vining plants.

The next more densely planted scheme is those that require one square foot. These include tomatoes, peppers, okra,  everything from the cabbage family— including , of course, cabbages, broccoli, cauliflower,and  brussel sprouts (yum!).

This is followed by those plants requiring four per square. You can achieve this spacing by dividing the square in half in each direction with your finger, creating a plus-shaped shallow groove. Plant one seed or plant in each square you have created! The types of plants used here would be bush type lettuce like bibb or buttercrunch. Also garlic, corn, leeks.

The next more densely planted square is divided into 9 squares. You can achieve this by drawing a tic-tac-toe board into the square, creating 9 equal spaces. The type of vegetables going here will be bush-style green beans, beets, turnips, spinach, and onions.

This brings us to a square divided into 16 smaller squares. You can do this by dividing the square like you do the 4-per-square, then divide each square into 4. The plantings you will do here are carrots, radishes, smaller onions. Carrots and radishes have very tiny seeds. You may do what I do, which is to scatter the seeds over the square, then thin when they get an inch tall or so.

There are a few specialty plantings, such as peas and sugar snap peas, and cucumbers. These are planted 4 to 6 in a square, but since they will be trained onto a trellis, they are planted all in a row in the middle of the square.

Since this is just a beginning discussion, we won’t go into what plants go best with what plants. There are a few things to take into consideration here, though. When planning those plant that will need to be trellised, you need to consider how much daylight will get to the rest of the square. Also, be careful that your bushier plants won’t overwhelm you more delicate plants, such as lettuces.

A great and inexpensive trellis frame that we use is made from ellectrical conduit. It can be cut at your big box store (we use 6 foot long uprights and of course just under 4 foot ong crosspiece. You will also need a corner connecter, which is just screwed into place. Just screw the corners on,  set it into place , centering in the square at either end of the garden, and hammer it down about a foot or so. This will accomodate four adjacent squares. Later we will talk about stringing the trellis onto the frame.

More pictures from the garden next time! See you, and thanks for the comments!