Tomato Plant Support Methods
 

How do you support your tomato plants ?
Speaking for myself, I have done it mostly by staking and caging in the past.
But this year I am going to do it differently . NO more cage, No more staking individually.

Because I plant in rows (rather than in small raised beds ) I will practice :

1- [B]Stringing, lowering and layering[/B] (Just one row experiment).
2 - [B]Florida Weaving.[/B]. By this method I try to reduce the number of stakes by about 70%. For example, instead of using 3 stake for 2 plants I will use 2 stakes/poles for 4 plants.
[B]Why Not Cages ?[/B]
In my case, good cages are expensive to buy an/or to make. Any cage shorter than 6 ft is not effective. So you end up supplementing them by stakes.
Cost is important consideration. Fifty (50) cages at $10 per cage would cost $500.
Winter/off season handling and storage is yet another consideration.

How are you supporting your tomato plants ?
Please share your method(s) with us.

I will have about 75 plants all supported with oak stakes....6ft at about $1.25 apiece. I have added to my supply ea yr so that I usually buy only a dozen or two per yr. It is a lot of work esp pulling them at the end of the season. In dry weather almost impossible to keep from breaking in the ground. If I was starting over I would go the re-bar route. One time big expense but then set for life and much easier to work with.

I'm not changing anything. I will again have my hundred indeterminate plants hung on a wire spirals.
Vladimír

[QUOTE=MrBig46;631793]I'm not changing anything. I will again have my hundred indeterminate plants hung on a wire spirals.
Vladimír[/QUOTE]
I like your wire spirals. :yes:
Worth

I only grow about 15 plants so 6 ft tall cages made out of galvanized hog panels have lasted for years and will probably last for the rest of my gardening life. The concrete reinforcing wire worked well but were not nearly as sturdy and kept rusting off at the bottoms. The hog panels look the same as the day I first started using them.

I have tried most methods in the earlier days and will stick with CRW cages. I supply the older ones to the newer gardeners in our community garden since they usually don't understand the hows and whys of gardening just yet.

CRW cages have been my choice for more than 15 years. Back at the first use they may have been what I considered pricey, but for less than $25, 25 cages were built. Added to that cost are two 4 foot electric fence posts($1 each) for stability plus a little wire to secure the posts to the cage. Mine are 5 feet tall and 2 feet in diameter and contain my plants just fine.

Since then I have added another 10 cages and given away to relatives another ten. So for 14 years there has been no cost. Just make sure to disinfect with a bleach solution every year.

Storage may be a problem, but I have stacked them up in the garden until the next year.

It never happened that the wind damaged me a tomato plants. Wind gusts 55 km / h are common in my garden, in storms reach 90 km / h, the biggest one was 113 km / h. I grow tomatoes on one stem in a wire spirals which acts as a spring.
Vladimír

String, tomato clips, and lower. I have been doing this for at least six years and the results have been terrific. For the last couple of years I have maintained only single stem plants which make it even easier. The advantages for me are low recurring costs just the string and clips, ease of spraying fungicides and pesticides, allows a greater variety of plants in a smaller space, and most of all once it is all setup it takes minimal attention to maintain plants.

In the past I have tried staking, CRW cages, and trellising. They each have their advantages and disadvantages. Down here where the season is so long staking is just not practical for indeterminate tomatoes because they get huge. The same problem is also evident with cages plus they tend to get too bushy in cages and that is just an invitation to diseases and pests in our high humidity. The trellising is a decent way to go but eventually even with a huge trellis the plants out grow it and it starts to look like a hedge. Trellising also means more work tying and pruning and the plant stems crisscross so much that it is almost impossible later in the season to know what variety you are looking at unless the fruit is very distinctive looking.

Bill

I have about 130 CRW cages that I made for about $3/ea, I tie them to a 6' rebar beat 1-2 feet in the ground. They last a lifetime even though stored outside over winter.

11 April 2017 Tomato Overhead
 

[B][URL="http://durgan.org/2011/?p=6214"]11 April 2017 Tomato Overhead Support Structure.[/URL][/B]

Posted on [URL="http://durgan.org/2011/?p=6214"]April 11, 2017[/URL] by [URL="http://durgan.org/2011/?author=1"]Durgan[/URL]
[URL]http://durgan.org/2017/April%202017/11%20April%202017%20Tomato%20Overhead%20Support%20Structure./HTML/[/URL] 11 April 2017 Tomato Overhead Support Structure.
My tomatoes are supported by strings tied to an overhead support structure. I do not remove suckers from my plants. The structure is built every year using 8 foot steel fence posts, 8 foot rebar and plastic ties. The size is 8 feet by 20 feet, space for about 18 tomato plants. Strings are applied as necessary throughout the season to keep the fruit off the ground and support the fruiting branches. Three to five strings are usually sufficient. It takes about three hours to construct working alone.
[IMG]http://durgan.org/2017/April%202017/11%20April%202017%20Tomato%20Overhead%20Support%20Structure./HTML/dsc_6113_std.jpg[/IMG]

Wow, Wow ! What a crowd, what a crowd !:yes:

We seem to be a diverse group of gardeners here.
By a rough estimate, cage users have the majority. I used to use cages too. Actually I made some myself from CRW. But it cost me close to 7 bucks a piece. I also used a lot of stakes by ripping cedar lumber. In PNW cedar lumber cost was pretty reasonable and sometime I got them at 70% off at Home Depot. When I moved, I left tons of them behind, for my relatives.
So now I am experimenting w/ STRINGING and FLORIDA WEAVE for the first time.
Eight (8) more posts to go before I will be done with the installation part. But then I will be busy with stringing and weaving, almost every day.:))
Somef my plants reaching 18"+ height. Got to support them before the winds start blowing hard.

Stakes and pruning here. Currently using bamboo, but I may start transitioning over to t-posts as the bamboo starts to give out.

T posts with old chicken wire strung between them to tie off to with string or twine.I would have preferred old style field fencing instead of the chicken wire, but that is what Greg put up for me, so it's what is in play for now.

my new method was amazing last year, I used 8ft wide flower trellis plastic netting but instead of laying it flat I hung it vertically. I put cross bars on my 8' raised bed posts and looped the very top loops through these bars and attached the bottom of the netting to my raised beds. instead of leaving it parallel to the edges of my beds I pushed the tops of the netting to the center of the bed making a triangle and I weaved the plants through the netting. when they got about half way to 3/4 up the netting you move the peak back out to parallel with the bed edges so you get better air flow. I usually double stem and this bed was prolific and easy to manage (with the exception of mulching once the net was in place)