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41 Comments
Do you apply the grass cuttings immediately while freshly cut or Do you leave it in place to dry out before side dressing it onto the tomato plants? TIA
It's 2.44 AM in where I live Agadir Morocco and just got notified with your video while having difficulty to sleep .. so good timing 😃
Greeting from Morocco 🙏
good job! a thought use used lattace in landscape wired to the t-posts
One other option for trellising might be construction remesh. I've used it for a number of things, from making cages around seedling trees to enclosing raised beds to keep the deer out of them. I keep intending to set some up as a long term trellis but have not got to it yet.
Good plan for the peppers. I'm trying the same thing this year because mine were grown in the high tunnel. Crossing my fingers.
“Catch up ketchup I suppose”
I think that plastic trellis is a mistake. I dealt with beans on plastic rope once and I'm still picking plastic pieces out of the soil. I'd stick with biodegradable rope or solid steel wire, just use more, not just two strings
I firmly believe that there is no such thing as too many tomatoes because you can always find people to give them away to. I enjoy giving them away almost as much as I enjoy eating them.
Hello from Syracuse. I use t posts and hortanova netting. I am on my second year using it. Mine would be in great shape if I wasn’t so fast with my snippers.
This year I added conduit to support the top instead of wire using pvc joints and conduit connecters to connect them together. It has worked out well for my tomatoes this year.
I also use it for my beans too. Then I decided to use bamboo stakes over the walkway so they could grow across to the next row. With the Scarlet Runner beans I just ran a string over the conduit with a U stake.
I even use it with my 7’ Ethiopian eggplant.
Tpost and Hortanova for the win for me.
Have tried a wide variety of netting/trellis over 35 years of growing annual veg. Plastic net such as Hortonova only held up for 3 years max for me before sections started snapping, but I do leave my trellises in place over the New England winter, probably shortening their lifespans. Over time, I've replaced all but one length with cattle panel trellises. I still have one nylon string net that's showing its age, probably close to 15 years now.
my san marazano has not given me one tomato i guess is too hot…
👍
I have seen Cattle Panels used for the tomates(melons, cues,beans) I am sure these panels would last a quite a few years
Have you ever used any metal fencing or welded wire? Do you avoid it, or just not had access to a reasonably priced piece to try?
Next year I’m going to try the netting they use on crab pots 👍🇬🇬
I laid in bed thinking about my tomato support for next year and woke up to this video. Next year I am planning on doing an overhead high tension top wire about 8' high and dropping strings to each plant. Also want to setup a large bed of free bushing plants as a trial.
It's soulfood to see you finally take your genius mind to tomatoes ✨👏 especially the welded wire over of the net is so snart…!! I have been trying to figure out how to make the sag go away and tried with taut string but want 100% happy with it, so this seems great. The Florida weave might be improved by doing something diagonal? Instead of straight lines. That would also add some "depth". But another variation, on the same concept, would be
to build simple tonato cages that you out every 10-15 feet, out in a row. They are 1,5-2feet across which would turn into that much depth.
the cages CAN be really sturdy – they need to be connected to a t-post – and would add that extra depth. so, diagonal string giving support not "only" lengthwise or upwards but 1,5foot in the other direction. You could also do lines diagonally in the height direction. Sorry, my English feels really limited right now so not sure this makes much sense.. but it's almost like you can make your own netting but with the added dimension of depth. Meaning meaning plants could "sprawl" mid-air without a problem because there is support everywhere.
Btw, really snart choice of height of tomatoes – really tall ones are maybe a bit overrated? And definitely require way more effort. But that 3-4ft height seems really snart. Milennial gardener seems to have nailed the lower varieties – he has a video where he goes into some specific varieties, like a 3ft beefsteak, a crazy-productice Roma tomato (it has "vf" in the name). etc. Also, I think lower growinf tomatoes are supposed to have less disease 👍 but yours seem so healthy 😮💪
I'm in NNJ and we don't use any plastic mulch. It's grass clippings, rabbit poo and paper bedding as well as shredded paper and leaves. Tomatoes this year went absolutely crazy for us. I grow all heirloom varieties from my saved seeds and this year the pink beefsteaks and the striped roma tomatoes are the stars. The pink heirlooms are a good 10 foot tall and OMG produced none stop with just under 2lbs tomatoes. We trellis most of our tomatoes on crab netting we picked up at the curb. It's held up for a good 8 years so far on some metal poles we installed. We are on the top of a ridge line so need to constantly add mulch. I do also grow comfrey for mulch as well as make comfrey tea to fertilize throughout the summer. We water very rarely and the ground stays moist as well as has a huge population of red wigglers.
Would love to hear Sasha's ketchup recipe!
Those brassicas were such over-achievers in the shade of the seaberry. What a wonderful combination. I wish my grandfather, who became a gentleman farmer upon his retirement in the 1970's, had access to these videos. He managed to get decent harvests from clay-rich gumbo soil in farm town turned petrochemical dystopia Pasadena, Texas. But, he had to manage his soil with lots of fertilizer and a lot of care. I think he would have loved taking your perspective on soil-building as a capital investment and applying it to his nanofarm garden.
You shuld definitely consider selling t-shirts. I wouldn't mind walking around with a nice piece of art like the ones in your previous videos and maybe Edible Acres logo on the back as a little advertisement. You might be able to find someone who can print for you. perhaps on old recycled t-shirts or something.
Ketchup catchup. Love it!
I use 2×4 welded wire attached to posts as my trellis of choice. Works fantastic, even in the winds we get here. Except when the larger varieties try to grow in the gap between wires. I tried the florida weave for peppers this year but didn't have it tight enough and they are flopping a bit with the weight. Like the idea of the large mesh with a lead wire. Might try that next year. Please let us know how the sweet potato/ pepper mix goes. I was thinking of trialing that next year and would love some tips.
Ketchup video for sure please 😁
I've been transitioning my trellises to cattle panels. The initial cost is somewhat high, but they last a long time and are high strength. Thanks for the video!
I think your interest in annuals is directly related to becoming a father.
Great stuff but let’s hear more from Sacha about the evils of capitalism. I would listen.
Tomatoes are looking really good, especially since it's not the best year for them. One tip for you, if you don't know it yet, is to cut the tops of the indeterminate tomatoes. Including the blooms. I think you are a zone 6? tomatoes in bloom right now won't have enough time to mature with good flavor with the sun lessening in strength. Topping the plants triggers them to hurry up and ripen what is already there. While there are uses for green tomatoes for sure, I don't love the idea of having several bushels of them. 😅 I am still not set on how to trellis tomatoes. I have never found the ah ha method. I keep trying though. 😁
You mentioned in post that your plants don't necessarily like to grow on metal.
With that in mind, some ideas for future trellises.
Black locust staves instead of t posts.
Additional horizontal runs of jute twine or dead grapevines parallel and beneath the 17 gauge wire.
Stalks of dead bamboo/miscanthus/willow etc, woven through the horizontal lines at intervals.
This would be much more work, but this would roughly approximate the plastic netting, and when it decays it will become more mulch , not plastic bits.
I was told Carpathian walnuts had minimal juglone
I like peppers and tomatoes too
I wonder if tomatoes make a nice fruit leather. It sure would reduce the volume of fruit material, tomatoes have a lot of water. I imagine that a Black Cherry andor Sungold fruit leather would be amazing. It would require a lot of pans and a pretty industrial solar dryer with the abundance of tomatoes you are producing. Nice that a lot of them are going for fresh sale, nothing like that to prove the difference in quality between storegarden produce. Tasting my first heirloom tomato ripe from the vine blew my mind, I thought I didn't like tomatoes at all, but it was just the industrial food system. Be well 🙂
One Yard Revolution used metal conduit to great success for trellising tomatoes. Really cool to see a tomato vine be trellised up a tall pole, the trusses of fruit get huge. He used that technique to grow tomato vines in partial shade all throughout his garden, they still produce pretty well that way, especially when viewed from yield per square foot. The smaller fruited varieties seem to do better this way. I like growing smaller ones anyways, perfect bite sized treats.
I love the seaberry integration. Mixing annuals and perennials together in harmonious ways is everything.
Gagnolle farm (they have a youtube channel) used different methods, from memory : for paste tomatoes basically a low mesh tunnel, between two rows of tomatoes, to then let the plants grow over. Or even crates
When we had a truck garden growing up in the 60's, my paws brother had rolls of woven wire fencing he'd taken down from the old dairy farm, so it was free. Back then woven wire fence was the standard to keep sheep and cows in and roving packs of feral dogs out…usually. Anyways. Dad got a couple rolls of woven wire fence and a bunch of 6 foot T posts and banged each post about 5 feet apart to hold up the woven wire fence. He did not set corner posts or use a stretcher and the fence did bend over with the weight of heavy-cropping tomatoes, not a terrible thing, just had some losses. If you can find lengths of woven wire fencing for free, I'd take that any day over plastic. Like you made rings with it in your chicken composting system, you can also "ring in" your tomatoes, peppers, anything that needs support. Love your channel & Family! Keep On!
I'm trellising about 30 tomato plants on a similar combo of t-posts but with rebar for the stake and woven between them is steel aircraft cable. We get bad windstorms nowadays that are unnervingly often and it holds up better than nets or twine or wood even. One of the storms this Winter severely bent the 3/8 in rebar holding wire hardware cloth tree cages so we go with half-inch or greater rebar now and use a hydraulic cutter to buy it cheaper in the longer form then cut it.
When you save seed from your tomatoes, do you control for cross-pollination?
👍🏼👍🏼 Trellising tomatoes is an artform. Every season brings its own unique way of trellising. After ~50 years of gardening tomatoes, Cattle Panels are as good as it gets for all trellising plants.
Permaculture is redundant verbal salad for the naive, gullible and overeducated seeking to place the veil of rocket science around old fashioned peasantry. Totallly worthless impractical BS. Shame on everybody who peddles it.
https://youtu.be/6vqRMKOxaW8?si=i7u8jK0fM0U1w1Iq
I use a much smaller variation of this. Had a chain link fence metal long pole as top and use similar pvc t’s to hold pole to t posts.