The Search for a Trellis System.

Last year I planted 12 tomatoes, 4 rows of 3 plants each. I had this brilliant idea to use the Florida Weave method. It would be beautiful both for it's simplicity and more importantly the ability to break it down at the end of the season and store it in my hall closet. Yeah, I mentioned my garden shed is actually a quarter of my hall closet, right next to my Christmas tree, my laundry detergent and mop bucket. This is NYC, we make do with what we have. Anyway, back to the Florida Weave method. It basically involves putting to posts at the end of each row, and weaving twine in between the plants, alternating sides with each pass, so that each plant is caught between the string and held up and together, neatly and uniformly. Well, not to bash on it, but I really don't see how it works without re-bar or a cage system. The posts quickly started leaning towards each other as the weigh of the plants and fruit grew and eventually they were just a giant mess on each other. NEVER AGAIN FOLKS, NEVER AGAIN.

This winter I spent researching various ways to get my tomatoes standing tall.

My goals for a Trellis System were:

• It should be cheap, cost effective. Yes, I could buy individual jumbo cages, but they're expensive for the number of tomatoes I want to grow.
• It should be easy to assemble, something I can do, by myself, and keep all my fingers and toes, without needing a saw or needing to create a mini-workshop in my front room.
• It should as compact and easy to store as possible, ideally in a hall closet, but push came to shove, behind my wardrobe or under my bed (what, do you not store garden equipment under your bed??)
• It should keep the tomatoes upright, easily, without constant tending (as I'll be out of the country for 3 weeks) and shouldn't be unnecessarily fussy or labor intensive to maintain.
• It should be strong and capable of holding the weight of the tomatoes. 
• It should allow as much of a breeze as possible to pass, which'll help with disease. 

I found a few ideas, but ultimately the only one that really fit my needs was the Vertical String method with Electrical Conduit Pipe as support. First, the Vertical String Method involves tying a bowline knot around the base of the plant and then twisting like a corkscrew up the length of the plant, from there it goes to a Electrical Conduit Pipe which is part of a basic frame and attached there. As the plant grows you twist it around the string more and it grows up and up. The most important part of this is pinching back suckers, which is do-able and not super labor intensive.  For mine I built a shoebox shaped frame, with PVC pipe elbows and joints and ECP. If I decide to use this method next year, I'll use electrical conduit pipes that I've soldered joints together, for now PVC pipe joints and a helluva lot of gorilla tape to hold things all together. 

So far the Director of the garden has commented about the ambitiousness of my system and that because I'm right up front everyone's been looking in and wondering what I'm doing and whether it'll succeed. Gah, ambition should be made of sterner stuff. 

Next time: The Trellis, Tomatoes go in and the garden comes to life.