String tomato trellis
The second project I'm
itching to try out this year is training tomatoes onto a string
trellis. As long-time readers know, fungi thrive in our wet
climate and we're always battling blight on tomatoes. We already stake carefully and prune heavily,
but Kimball's idea of separating out the three stems to each be
supported by one vertical line is a very good one. Since we have
some space below our new grape/kiwi trellis
this year, I'll try two or three tomatoes there using Kimball's string
method, and may also experiment with adding additional supports for my
other tomatoes so I can separate out their three stems more carefully as
well. (In the past, I've trained to three stems, but have tied
them all to one stake.)
While I'm talking trellising, I should add that The Planet Whizbang Idea Book for Gardeners
is full of trellises and other structures based on t-posts. I
have a feeling that Kimball loves t-posts as much as Mark loves 5-gallon
buckets, so if you have an equal affinity for the lowly t-post, you
should definitely give his book a try. You'll find t-posts turned
into grape trellises, pea trellises, hops supports, bird feeder
supports, and much more.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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We tried the string trellises one year. We had two problems with them. First, they were a lot of work--the tomatoes wouldn't climb the string trellises naturally but needed the gardeners help to make it up the trellises. Second, we live in a high wind area of Virginia. We had many problems with trellises being knocked down, or tomatoes being pulled off of the trellises by the winds.
As I recall, our entire string trellis project was a loss, and the only thing we managed to recover were some of the tomatoes that grew across the ground.
In other words, YMMV.