Hey, good afternoon, it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose farm
I don't think I've had you in my tomato house before but here I am today to show you
How and why I train my tomatoes to two heads
Now of training them two different heads is something that really applies more for
indeterminate varieties of tomatoes
Like this one here the kind that will vine and continue growing all the way through the season
there's another kind of tomato on the market that's called bush tomatoes (or indeterminate) they simply grow to a certain height and
Age and then they flower and then they're done so you don't have to worry so much on those ones about training two heads
but these ones here are greenhouse tomatoes that I will train up strings like this and
For that purpose. I want to train them down to two heads. Now. What do I mean by that?
Well, every time you have a tomato have a leaf above that leaf and I'll show you a close-up here
there's something called a sucker and
that sucker, if left to grow, will make a whole new vegetative shoot of the tomato and
That itself will make a new head what's more for every leaf that that one throws
there will be another head there as well as you can see well imagine that results in a plant if unchecked that has like a
bazillion different shoots not that much fruit
lots of foliage and is not great for training or
managing in a greenhouse situation for fruiting so I'm going to show you how to
Take off some of those suckers right now and I'll give you a close-up of the plant
Well, you might see that these are a little bit large for their initial training. I
ran out of time while growing other things this season and
Sort of neglected them for a while, but that's okay
It gives me a good opportunity now to show you
how to get one of these trained because there's lots and lots of different suckers on here
So some of the smaller suckers that happen between the leaf and the main stem
That's a sucker there can just be pinched off
Like that, very easy and pinch off all of these small ones the exact same way just to get them out of the way
So that we can start to see the structure of this thing and see already that it's sort of naturally trained itself
to
Sorry to count out loud for you again, but one two three
Four five main heads and five heads are too many
for a
For a tomato two would be perfect and I'm thinking on this one here
Because I have a string over here and I have a string back this way that the one main had the big one here
I'm going to train onto this back string and then either this one or maybe this one can go up this string here
So, let's see how it goes. So for some of these larger suckers that have already gotten quite big
It's going to take the Clipper to take those off. So
Easy enough
Back here
In behind there's another one this one I'll just pinch off by hand
It's no problem to strip off some of these lower leaves. In fact I much prefer it because eventually
They will be falling off anyway
Really low down on the on the tomato and so I like to take those off early here's a
Larger sucker up this way, and now I have to make that decision which one of these
Am I going to use this one or this one? This one's better in terms of being closer to the right direction
This one here is a little bit bigger. So
Eeny, meeny miny moe, I'm going to take this one off
Pinch off these ones here now the question becomes, how do I attach?
these to the strings for further training
when I first started doing this I
Grabbed some of these clips from the agriculture store and they're really easy to use you
Just pinch them around the string
so that when you close them, they'll be locked on tight and then click them around the stem and that holds it like
Very tight the only problem or downside of these are great for beginners great for when I first started doing this
But carrying around extra equipment or supplies when you're training Tomatoes just slows up the whole process
So what I prefer to do now is simply
Twist the plant around the string or the string around the plant whichever way your going to say it
And once you've done that just keep on going the same direction all the way up. I'll show you again on the big one here
Again, I'm gonna take off this leaf down low. I see another sucker here
Hi starting to look a little bit cleaner now right down to two heads. And on this one here. I'm just gonna go ahead and
Start twining it on
To the string. So the reason I train to two heads and I guess I should explain here
That is an arbitrary number. Some people just train up one string some people train up two or three and it's all fine
It's just what's convenient for me is that I have my green house here and if you look up
And I hope you can catch this on the video. They're tied up on to
The support of the green house there and I have one of those bars every five feet so I
Have two coming out of this pot here and they crisscross across the aisle here
And that means that this aisle is going to be blocked by tomatoes growing into it, but this aisle over here and
this aisle over here will be free for me to train the tomatoes and for me to do harvesting and so that number is
As I say completely arbitrary just to my growing situation
But I find that 2 is quite manageable for me here
Ok, should I do one more start to finish you can see obviously very confusing to begin with
It's again got 5 or 6 mean suckers down there
So I'm going to choose this one on this edge to go up this string
I'm going to choose one on the other edge to go the other string and
that means I'm going to cut out a big section of the tomato right there and
One here and yes, I've set that to me go back a long way but that's ok
I've got a long season here. I've got another four months of yield off of this and
training it more manageable right now means that I'm going to have
Better yields and a more manageable plant all the way through that season and that one
Was easy. So those are the basic steps of training your
indeterminate tomato onto two heads first
You choose a couple of good looking stems that are heading kind of the direction that you'd like
Then you use your clippers or your fingers to pinch off or cut off any stems that are going in other directions
With the chosen stems you train those either by winding them or by
Attaching them by clips onto the strings and then from there. It's just a matter of maintenance
You continue to pick your fruit you continue to wind up the string or attach with more clips and you continue to pull off
suckers as they develop in the crotch of the leaf there and
That's it. That way I get fruit here anyway from July through
approximately
October so and there it's manageable the whole time
So, thank you so much for watching today
if you have any
Questions about this method or any comments that you'd like to add to yourself about different ways that you do it
I'd sure like to hear those you can drop those in the comments below and thanks again for watching