To reduce work, prevent disease, improve yield Lift your tomatoes

By Pam Baytos

OSU Extension master gardener

Training tomato plants to grow vertically instead of horizontally saves space and makes cultivation and harvesting easier.

More importantly, it reduces common fungal diseases such as early blight, Septoria leaf spot, anthrac-nose and more.

It also will improve fruit quality, making you happy at harvest time.

I guarantee all of you get the early blight fungus every year, just like I do. This is the disease that starts as a little bull’s eyes on the bottom leaves, causing them to yellow and eventually expanding up from the bottom of the plant. It gets the tomatoes every year.

Thus, we’re going to discuss the Florida weave. This is a method of staking and tying your tomato plants. It uses half as many stakes (or fewer) as individual staking, and also saves labor. This method is suited to both determinate and indeterminate varieties.

First, understand how tomatoes grow. Determinate tomatoes have a bush growth habit. These varieties stop growing once they set a terminal bud, usually when they are around 4 feet tall. Determinate varieties are typically earlier than indeterminate varieties, but they have a short and defined production season. Indeterminate varieties keep growing indefinitely until frost, and continue to set new flowers and fruit throughout this time — if you can keep them healthy.

Tomatoes are big, busy plants if you’re taking care of them correctly. So you’ll want to space plants 2 feet apart in the row. Yes, many square foot gardeners put them closer together. But tighter spaces require you to get busy pruning, or cause the plant to get busy dying from disease.

Start by driving a stake 1 foot into the ground between every other plant or every three plants. Place the stake 3-4 inches from the base of the plant on the side away from the first bloom cluster to keep from trapping the fruit between the plant and stake. Make sure you do not drive a stake through the roots, depending on how you planted. You will want to use sturdy wooden or metal stakes 6-7 feet long for indeterminate varieties and 4 feet for determinate varieties. If you use wooden stakes think about using metal stakes every four or five stakes to make the trellis stronger, with double stakes at the end of each row for strength. In the long run, the metal “T” posts will be cheaper and strong.

When the plants are about 12 inches tall, tie untreated twine at one end of the row and begin the weave. Weave the twine in a figure-eight pattern between plants, wrapping twice around each stake down the row. After reaching the end stake, weave twine back up the row in the opposite direction, alternating with the first strand so each plant stem has twine on both sides, holding it up. As plants grow, weave another layer of twine every 6-8 inches to keep plants well supported. Repeat until you reach the top of your stakes.

The Florida weave is not only a labor-saving way to stake, it’s also easier to sanitize metal stakes than wire cages at the end of the season, which is important to prevent transferring diseases to next year’s crop.

If you want to recycle your old metal cages, get them out of your shed when winter sets in and wrap them with Christmas lights and line your walkways during the holidays. They look like small Christmas trees.

For more information on this and other methods, visit http://go.osu.edu/liftingtomatoes.