Trellising Tomatoes for a Big Harvest

Trellising is a great way to grow more of your favorite veg in a small garden space.  Crops like tomatoes, melon, and squashes can be grown together in a single 4’x8’ garden bed giving you great yields and still allowing for plants in the understory of your garden. How though? In this article, I will tell you just how this is possible.

There are two types of tomatoes. Determinate and Indeterminant. Determinant tomatoes are a bushing variety and many of your favorite tomatoes fall into this category1. Determinate tomatoes, in my experience, are not the variety that you should grow in a small garden space. For three reasons:

1.       Determinate tomatoes are a bush variety and should not be pruned; it lowers their yield.

2.       They produce all their tomatoes at once and then they ripen all at the same time. Just a few of these tomato plants can bury you in tomatoes, the problem is they tend to be all at the same time and that can lead to waste if you cannot keep up with them.

3.       They take up way more space than the indeterminate varieties.

I have been able to find all my favorite determinate varieties that grow as indeterminate. An indeterminate tomato grows as a vine. This is the variety that is desired in a small garden bed because it can be trellised. I grow them in 1 sqft per tomato plant and have had as many as 32 plants in a 4’x8’ bed each plant getting 10’+ tall requiring a ladder for me to maintain and harvest. Tomatoes can be trellised in a couple of different ways. You could use the Florida weave (Fig 1.) 

Fig 1 Florida Weave

Pro:

1.       The plants do not get as tall.

2.       Reduced pruning can allow these plants to bush more but be aware they can shade out other plants and be more susceptible to blight.

3.       The materials are cheap. You will need two tall stakes and twine. [i]

Cons:

1.       All tomatoes will get blight eventually, but I find that I tend to be more relaxed in my pruning of the tomatoes and I don’t get enough airflow to prevent blight using this method I start seeing blight sooner.

2.       It does overall save space, but it takes up more space than the next method. I would place these plants 2’ apart inline for this and allow for an additional 1’ in front of them or 1 plant per 4 sqft. You will have 16’ sqft left in a 4’x8’ bed.

3.       It can be a bit more difficult to see and remove pests because you do allow them to bush more.

String trellising tomatoes is my go-to method. Like the Florida weave it is cheap and easy. The main difference is that the twine is strung from an overhead support to a stake at the base of the tomato plant. (Fig 2.)

Fig 2. Trellising overhead. This is my preferred method of trellising tomatoes.

Pros:

1.       You can grow a tomato plant per sqft, you can grow all your favorite varieties with different harvest times to extend your tomato season.

2.       Quick and easy setup. Do not let your tomatoes get too tall before starting this method. It will be an issue since the stalk will not be as flexible and will potentially break as you wrap it around the twine.

3.       It is much easier to see pests like the hornworm.

4.       You can grow this as a two-leader plant getting a bit more yield off a single plant despite the pruning you will be doing.

Cons:

1.       It does require significantly more pruning which will affect your yields slightly. You can offset this by growing more in a smaller space. What to prune see (Fig 3). Your cuttings are essentially a whole new plant. Root them in water and you can pot them without having to start from seed.

Fig 3. If you are trellising, you must remove the suckers. Those suckers are new tomato plants. You can root them in water before moving them to soil.

2.       They get tall. Unless you top off your tomato plant it will keep growing until it dies from disease.

3.       Tomatoes can be exposed in hotter climates to sun-scald. I live in Texas and to help with this in the summer I will plant pole beans under the tomatoes for three reasons. I get beans for dilly beans; my all-time favorite snack, the bean leaves can act as a sunscreen for the tomatoes protecting them from sun scald and the legume family of plants has a symbiotic relationship with rhizobia a soil bacterium that can put nitrogen back into the soil!2

Whichever method you choose remember tomatoes are heavy feeders and you will need to fertilize them. Before planting my tomatoes, I turn over the bed putting organic material like fish, manure, or kitchen scraps about 18” down. Then when planting my seedlings, I put at the bottom of the hole a slow-release organic fertilizer for each plant. Ensuring that the plant has everything it needs to grow and produce its delicious fruit throughout the season. If you trellis your tomatoes you can be assured you will see good yields and still have room to grow your onions, cilantro, and jalapenos all in the same bed for homemade salsa parties later.

Kay and Jonah have enjoyed posing with one of our harvests over the years.

1 Mel Barthaolomew. (2005) All New Square Foot Gardening: Grow More in Less Space!. Franklin, Tennessee: Cool Springs Press.

2 Remo Chiozzotto, Mario Ramirez, Chouhra Talbi, Eleonora Cominelli, Lourdes Girard, Francesca Sparvoli, and Georgina Hernandez. (2018). Characterization of the Symbiotic Nitrogen-Fixing Common Bean Low Phytic Acid (lpa1) Mutant Response to Water Stress. Genes retrieved from Characterization of the Symbiotic Nitrogen-Fixing Common Bean Low Phytic Acid (lpa1) Mutant Response to Water Stress - PMC (nih.gov)