Hey there folks, Kathy and Brett here with Tomato Dirt and today we're talking about
do-it-yourself tomato trellises. So first of all, honey, can you explain to us why you trellised
tomatoes this year? Yeah, sure. I mean I've never really done, actually I haven't done this before
that I recall, but I'm running out of cages, okay? I ended up with six extra plants that
someone requested near and dear to me and I had a few poles left so I thought well let's just try
this and then I went in the barn and I had a 2x4 pressure treated in there, cut it in half on the
table saw and just proceeded to sort of figure out how to get it to mount up here. I drilled a
hole, you can come down here, drilled a hole in the 2x2 now and if you come over here and you can
see I ran some, this is just fence wire that I had left over, shrank it through and torqued it down but
surprisingly stout. Not going to fall off this year, maybe never if I left it, and did that
on all three posts. It's certainly not a high-end nor a high time consumption
job but it's going to stay up there. And then I had these plants laying on the ground
and I finally decided I have to do something. So how I did it is I put a little
I put a little metal pin down here, a little u-bracket, they're sort of laying everywhere
and just to give myself a base, tied a string, really I started at the top but either way you tie
a string at the top, I drilled a hole through here too, just tie a little knot, hopefully I can reuse
this string next year but I've got a nice little roll of it. It's waterproof by the way. Then it
comes down and I secured it here and then I just then I just sort of wrap the plant around it. I
can unwrap it so you can sort of see what's going on. Basically it started out like that
and you just proceed to wrap it carefully. So that trains the tomato, I'm training it
It's going to come up this string all summer and the other thing I like about this particular
setup is it's pretty easy to deal with and now I've got a, I'm 5'9 so this is
this is close to six feet and for everybody that goes to Walmart or Lowe's or someplace and looks
at those cages and they say I'd buy it but I wish it was taller, this is taller. And when it gets
above this and these will, I think I'll just trim them at the top to keep them from just going
everywhere but this is going to be good I think. What kind of string here did you use and what
kind of string do you recommend? Do you have anything you'd change about how you did this
This is my storage unit. I got it, I got it from Amazon. It's basically, it's basically nylon twine or nylon. It's a little
thinner than I wanted and I'm mildly concerned that it will be too thin and start to cut into
the plant but almost anything would work if you have but it's certainly strong enough and I got
plenty of it so I'm also going to use it I think maybe on the pole beans to run around to let them
not here but elsewhere. So at least the plants look good now. They're off the ground and it's a
we'll see how it does with the suckers and whatnot. I'm not sure about the suckers on this
sort of scenario but we'll find out. Anything you'd like to do differently or do better next
time or are you pretty satisfied so far? With this? Yes. I think it's going to be okay and
yeah I think it's gonna be fine. Great. Happy trellising. Bye