Thirty-two square feet, eight tomato plants and about a hundred feet of garden twine. That was my morning. It's the Saturday after the Fourth, the yard still smells faintly of Nate's grill from last night, and the east bed has turned into exactly the jungle I predicted in May, when I planted eight tomatoes in a bed built for six.
How it got this way
I knew better. A 4-by-8 bed comfortably holds six indeterminate tomatoes. I planted two rows of four because I'd grown every seedling from seed and couldn't pick which two to give away. Seven weeks later the plants are shoulder high, the middle of the bed is dark and humid, and I have to turn sideways to reach anything in the back row.
The problem with crowding isn't just looks. Leaves that stay wet longer get leaf spot, and in a humid July that creeps up from the bottom. Fruit hidden in a tangle is fruit I don't see until it splits. And plants leaning on each other eventually lean on whatever is holding them up, until the whole thing tilts toward the path after a thunderstorm.
Two cages and a Florida weave
The two Cherokee Purples, side by side at the end of the bed nearest the back fence, have been in our two heavy square cages since planting day. Those are holding up fine. The other six (two San Marzanos, two Amish Paste, the Early Girl and the Sungold) only had short bamboo stakes, and they'd outgrown them by the end of June.
For those six I used a Florida weave, which sounds fancier than it is. You drive tall stakes between the plants, tie twine to the first stake and run it along one side of the row, looping it once around each stake, then come back down the other side. The plants end up sandwiched between two lines of twine. Every eight to ten inches of new growth, you add another pass higher up.
I drove eight 7-foot stakes, four down each row: one at each end and one between each pair of plants. They go about 18 inches deep, through the bed's 11 inches of soil and into the ground underneath. Nate held each one straight while I pounded with the mallet, and we only argued about plumb twice. Then I wove four passes of twine, from about a foot off the soil up to chest height. By the end each row was one tied-together block that leans on itself instead of falling over, and the cages at the far end act like bookends.
Pruning while I was in there
A weave doesn't fix crowding by itself, so I also pruned, more than I usually have the nerve to:
- Every leaf below the first cluster of fruit came off, so nothing touches the soil and air can move through the bottom foot of the bed.
- Most suckers came off too, the shoots that grow in the angle between a branch and the main stem. I left two or three leaders on each plant, not the six or seven they were trying for.
- Any leaf with yellow edges or brown spots went straight into a bag for the trash, not the compost.
By noon I had a full contractor bag of leaves and both hands stained a sticky yellow-green that smelled like tomato vines and wouldn't wash off. That smell is my favorite thing about July. The light inside the bed changed completely. Where it had been dark at the base, there was dappled sun on the mulch and a clear view of the green fruit, hard and pale as jade, hanging in clusters on every plant.
One mistake: I waited a week too long on the Sungold. Its stems had grown stiff, and when I tucked one leader behind the twine it snapped with a crack. That's one less branch of Sungolds this year, which Mateo has not been told.
Where things stand
The Early Girl has the biggest fruit so far, a few the size of tennis balls. The San Marzanos and Amish Paste are covered in clusters of small green ovals. The Cherokee Purples are the slowest, as always, with only a handful of fruit set. Nothing is close to ripe, which is normal for the first week of July here. The first Sungolds usually color up in the last week of the month, and the four cherries in buckets on the porch are on about the same schedule.
I'll add a pass of twine every week or so as they climb. Until then the routine is simple: deep water at the base two or three times a week, leaves stay dry, suckers come off every Saturday.
Nate stood at the edge of the bed when we finished, wiped his hands on his jeans and said it looked like a vineyard. It looks like eight tomatoes in a bed built for six, tied up very neatly. But I'll take vineyard.
