Holding Stuff Together With Baling Twine

There is an old, tired line about holding stuff together with duct tape, chewing gum, and baling twine.  Sometimes, it's true, and is exactly what we do use to fix things.  When the cows are just about finished with a round bale of hay, I'll go out to the bale with my pocketknife and will cut the twine into manageable pieces.  I roll it together neatly and put it aside.  You never can tell when you'll need it.

Just so happens I needed it the other day.  With our "summer in late December" gifting us with days in the 80's, our garden is growing by leaps and bounds.  In fact the crop of cilantro is bolting right now.  You can see it on the bottom left of the photo below.  The other thing you can see is our Sugar Snap Peas growing on the trellis.  It is growing so fast and so lush and heavy, that it is causing us some problems.

The vines normally wrap their tendrils around the trellis and creep upward.  Some have done so, but others are so heavy, they are either breaking loose or they haven't firmly attached themselves to the trellis and are pulling down the other peas.  It's a mess and will be very difficult to harvest them.  Harvest won't be many days away.  The vines are full of blooms and little pods are already forming.

But, here's where the baling twine comes in.  I had wifey help me.  I strung out the baling twine from one end of the trellis to the other.

And then I pulled it tight and tied it up.  The twine pulled the vines back up to the trellis where, hopefully, the tendrils will wrap themselves against the cattle panels and hold this time.  

I'm thinking that next week I'll have to add another layer of twine a couple of feet higher.  I also use the twine for the "Florida Weave Tomato Trellis" method that we use every year.  Save your twine.  You never know what it'll come in handy for.

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.  

Trellising Tomatoes with the "Florida Weave" Method

I remember years ago when I watched TV more than I do now, there was an award on one of those Award Shows (Academy Awards, maybe?) for Best Supporting Role. They would call up an actor or an actress who wasn't the lead in the film, but their role played a major part in the success of the particular movie.

Taking that analogy to the garden, I have an award for Best Supporting Role for holding up the vines of the Heirloom tomatoes I plant.  They happen to be all indeterminate varieties, as opposed to the determinate (or bush type).  The success of the garden depends on the support mechanism for the vines and I've tried them all. Here are my nominees for Best Supporting Role for Holding up Heirloom Tomatoes:

First we have The Stake:  In support of the tomato plants this guy is top notch.  He excels it holding up a bush tomato with little effort.  It is pretty cheap - about $1.99 per stake. His weaknesses include rotting.  At the end of the season when I go to pull it up, the stake breaks in the ground as it has rotted over the course of the season.  But the primary limitation is that it is not effective in holding up the indeterminate vines that grow and grow and grow.

The next nominee is The Cage:  This nominee is great for bush tomatoes/peppers as well.  A little more expensive at about double the cost of a stake - $3.89 each, at least he doesn't rot and you can use him again and again as a supporting actor.  He doesn't get 'type-cast' as you can use him for tomatoes, peppers, egg plant, etc.  But he's not effective in holding up the long, long, indeterminate vines either.

Nominee #3 is The Cattle Panel:  Now we're getting somewhere.  A cattle panel mounted between two T-posts will support indeterminate vines.  As they grow taller and taller, you just tie the vines to the panel with pieces of torn up t-shirt or cloth. You can use it year after year.  The only downside is cost.  A 16 foot panel will cost you roughly $35 and throw in the T-post supports and you are looking at $45 bucks for just a 16 foot section! Ouch.

All those are pretty good.  BUT...The winner of the award for Best Supporting Role in holding up Heirloom Indeterminate Tomatoes is... (drum roll as I open the envelope)...  The Florida Weave Method of Tomato Staking! 

The Florida Weave Method uses 3 T posts per 30 foot row, so it is only a $15 investment and you can use them year after year in the garden or in the pasture.  I've used this method for several years and I like it the best.  Here's how it works.  Use a 'T-post banger' or a sledge hammer to drive a T post at either end of your tomato row. I usually drive them until the "foot" of the T-post is even with ground level.  If I have a wooden stake lying around, I might drive that in the middle for extra support.

T-posts driven on either end with a wooden stake (optional) in the middle.

Next is your most important step, your supporting mechanism is the 'guide wires' that are attached to each T-post and hold up the plants.  I use poly baling twine as it is free to me.  When I purchase my round bales, I cut the twine off, pull out from the bale and wrap around a stick for use later.  You can use baling twine for most anything, almost as integral as duct tape for use around the homestead.

I count 3 notches up from the ground and tie a length of baling twine securely to the T-post.  Then I stretch out the twine and WEAVE the twine in serpentine fashion down the row, running it on the right side of the first plant and on the left side of the second plant, and so on and so forth until you get to the other T-post. Circle the T-post several times with the twine to hold it taut and then repeat the steps back to the first T-post, only this time running the twine on the opposite side of the plant from the first go-round.

Oh, Oh, Dream Weaver - I believe you can get me through the tomato season...

You repeat this process as the tomatoes grow.  I add another strand of baling twine for every 3 notches of T-post as the plants grow.  You can see below how the strands of twine pulled tight and weaved around the plants provide support to the growing vines.

A good support structure

Here is another angle.  One of the things that I try to do when weaving is that I use the branches of the tomato as part of the process.  You can see that I've run the twine just beneath one of the branches.  The twine lends support to the plant, holding it up from the tomato plant's "arm pits."

I got ya!

Sometimes your plants will grow at different spurts where some are tall enough to be supported by "the weave" and some won't.  Some plants grow at their own pace.  No problem.  Just watch them and as they grow tall enough, open the twine up and pull them in the middle of the supporting strands of twine.

Here are some of the same plants a few weeks later.  You can see that I've added a couple more runs of twine as the plants have grown.

Tomatoes 'a Growin'

Now here's a good place to mention that while you are weaving, it is a great time to inspect the plants for suckers and remove them.  I see a big one below.  Do you?  I almost let this one go too far.

Suckers on Tomato Plants

Maybe tomorrow we'll show how to identify and remove suckers off of your tomato plants.  Right now, though, we'd like to give a parting applause to The Florida Weave, winner of the Our Maker's Acres Best Supporting Role Award for 3 years running!