The Best Method I Know of to Trellis Tomatoes

We plant heirloom, open pollinated tomatoes in our garden.  These tomatoes aren't the hybrid, determinate (bush-type) varieties that you attach to a stake.  These tomatoes are indeterminate, meaning they vine and just keep growing and growing and growing.  I've tried unsuccessfully to stake them, but their volume is just too much for the stake and inevitably the tomato plant weighs down the stake and the entire thing comes tumbling down.  It makes a mess.

The Internet proves to be a great source of information and I learned a trellising technique while researching that really works and although I've posted about this in past years, I'll share it again for new readers. People a lot smarter than I am came up with this tomato trellising idea that is called The Florida Weave.  That sounds like a trendy hairstyle or a crocheting technique, but funny name aside, this really works.

If you use wooden stakes and live in our climate, each year you have to purchase new stakes as they rot over the course of the year.  Not so with the stakes used for the Florida Weave - you use metal T-posts.  They'll last forever.  The method will hold up tomatoes in rough weather.  The tomatoes you see below just went through two separate storms carrying > 60 mile per hour gusts of wind and they are just fine.

The Florida Weave

Let's go step by step.  My garden rows are 30 feet in length.  I drive a T-post on one end, a T-post in the middle, and a T-post on the other end.  These serve as the main support skeleton of the apparatus.

T-posts provide the 'spine' of the trellising system

I purchase round bales of hay for our cows.  When I put the bales out in the pasture, I remove the polypropylene baling twine and wrap in around a stick to save for later.  Now is later!!  I take the twine and anchor it firmly around the T-post on the end.  Then I weave (see how it gets its name?) the twine around each plant - to the right side of one plant, to the left side of the next.  When I come to the center T-post, I firmly wrap the twine and continue weaving until I get to the T-post on the end. 

I tie it tight and re-trace my steps, only this time, I weave the twine on the opposite side of the tomato stem, weaving until I get to the end and then I tie it up tight.  You can see in the picture below that the twine forms a support structure around the plant. 

We appreciate your Support!

With the first strand complete, we put our twine away, but keep our eyes on the plants.  In a week or so they will have grown another 6 inches.  At that point we'll repeat the steps just shown (just 6 inches higher) and we'll have two strands of support.  We'll repeat the process again and again.  I think last year, I had 6 horizontal strands.

The thing I'm going to change this year is I will try to add some additional support going up. My T-posts are 6 feet in length and these tomatoes grow taller.  In past years everything is real neat and tidy until the tomato plant grows higher than 6 feet, then the top kind of falls over.  I tried to train the vines to climb along the top twine, but it still got kind of messy.  This year I'm going to try to extend the height by wiring another post to the top of each T-post and continue up vertically.  We'll see how that goes.

Healthy young tomato enjoying lots of support

These tomatoes have weathered some rough storms in April that brought high winds and over a foot of rain cumulatively.  I think now we'll get some more stable weather and we'll be able to watch the tomato plants really flourish over the next month or so.  Lots of the plants are putting on blooms. The plant below has a double bloom.  This is not uncommon and the fruit will be fine.  It will just produce an odd, atypical-shaped fruit.  Apparently, they appear on early blossoms and some think they are caused by cool weather or cross-pollination.  You aren't supposed to save the seeds from fruit like this if you want to produce the uniform-looking perfect tomato.  

Double Bloom on the tomato

Back to the Florida Weave, this process has really made growing tomatoes much easier and orderly for me and I recommend it highly.  There's always little tweaks to help make things better, but all in all, this technique is a winner.