Vanisle_BC
Greener Thumb
Posts: 1354
Joined: Mon Apr 13, 2015 9:02 pm
Location: Port Alberni, B.C. Canada, Zone 7 (+?)

Training tall tomato vines: Allow one stem, two, or several?

Some of my favourite tomato varieties get inconveniently tall and awkward to train. I usually prune each plant to two stems and clip them to strings suspended from above. Anyway, I'm pondering how it would be to allow maybe 4 or 5 stems per plant and "top" each one before any get too high; going for more horizontal spread and less vertical. Do any of you do it this way - might it reduce yields? A disadvantage would be the greater amount of space each plant would occupy in the bed.

A major culprit this year was Black Vernissage which I grew for the first time and really like, but it seriously outgrew the height of my supports.

By the way I've been using plastic clips to hold the vines on the strings but the clips mostly don't last more than one season in the sun. I hate having to buy more every year.

Do any of you grow dwarf varieties; and are they exclusively determinate bush types or are there also vining dwarf ones? Need wider cages than the usual garden-store kind?

imafan26
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Posts: 13962
Joined: Tue Jan 01, 2013 8:32 am
Location: Hawaii, zone 12a 587 ft elev.

I hated pruning and clipping tomato vines. Usually only two forks at most are allowed to grow, the rest of the suckers are taken off. We also used clips and tied them to 8 ft string trellises. All the lower leaves are taken off and side shoots are pruned. This is a weekly task. Once the tops get all tangled and out of control it is harder to get them tied, separated and back in line. When it gets really messy, then it is usually just a hatchet job just keeping the vines out of the paths so we could just get through. The cherries and currents were the worst offenders, but they are the sweetest tomatoes. We let them sprawl in another shade house since there were no trellises and they climb unto each other. In both these growing methods, if the vines get too thick, and the rain and humidity comes, then the vines start to get diseased. The semi dwarf were the easiest to keep from topping over but we would be cross tying branches to other trellises. By taking off most of the lower leaves and branches, the tomatoes clustered along the main line and they were bigger and easier to pick. The tomato house has an opaque roof so it was possible. I could not have done that to tomatoes exposed to the Hawaiian sun. We do reuse the clips, some do break over time but we are able to use them about 5 or 6 times, sometimes more. One of the other guys cleaned the house by cutting the training lines, but he never had to separate the tangle and retrieve the clips. It is also hard to put up new lines that are seven feet tall when you are only 5'3'" tall or shorter. We grew one tomato in a 15 gallon pot in a dutch bucket system in shade houses covered with opaque cloth. about 35% shade. Plants were about 2 ft apart, in double rows with about 30 buckets in a line. While it did not get much rain inside except from the sides, it did not get that much air either without a good breeze, so the higher humidity and temps inside the house would still made conditions good for mildew and pests still get in.

String training allows you to have more tomatoes in a tighter space to increase yields. You do have to take the time to train and cut off suckers which actually decreases the total number of tomatoes but the remaining ones are bigger. It is labor intensive. Because the trellises are so close, cross trellising was one way of opening up the plants and keeping the vines from piling up on top.

I usually cage my tomatoes at home. I still remove the lower leaves, but I don't do a lot of pruning. The vines top the cage but they will hang down and keep growing. It is less time consuming for me, but I only have at most 3 tomatoes at home since it is more than I need and I would rather use the space for other things. It does take up more space as I have 3-18 gallon tomato buckets in 10 ft. I still have to use bags to keep fruit flies off the fruit and bird netting and construction temporary fencing to keep the birds out. Sometimes it keeps me out too, since I have to disassemble it to harvest the fruit.



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