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Mark Hutton: Hello, I'm Mark Hutton, the Cooperative Extension vegetable specialist for the University
of Maine.
What I'd like to talk to you about today is basket weaving of tomatoes.
What we have here is a determinate tomato variety that we're going to show you how we
would do basket weaving with.
I should also say that we can do this with both determinate, or the bush plants, or the
indeterminate plants.
This system works with either one.
What you're going to need to do the basket weaving...
You'll notice that we have grade stakes put in.
We usually do one stake every three plants or every two plants.
These are four-foot stakes.
They're driven in the ground about a foot.
If you're going to basket weave indeterminate plants, I would suggest you use a five-foot
stake so that you have about a four-foot stake for the plants to grow up on.
The next thing you're going to need is some tomato twine.
You can buy boxes of tomato twine.
It's a three-pound box of twine.
You'll notice it's got a couple holes, so you can put your belt through this and wear
it on your hip.
If you don't want to buy a big box of twine, you can buy smaller ball holders for twine
and roll your own ball of twine, but you want to have something that you can wear on your
hip.
You see I've got my ball of twine on my hip.
The other thing I'm using is a small piece of PVC pipe.
This is half-inch pipe.
It's roughly about 18 inches long.
You'll see that I'm just going to use this as a wand.
These tomatoes already have one tie on them.
It's about eight inches off the ground.
It's just a beginning, where we've grown about a foot and we're ready for another tie.
Here we go.
We're going to take our string, we're going to tie it to our end stake.
We're going to use our wand to reach down in, and we're simply going to go in and out
around the plants.
We'll start here, we'll come around this one, around this one, and when we get to the stake
we'll take a half-turn around the stake, and we'll use the pipe to pull the string tight.
Make another turn or two, and we'll just continue down the row.
When we get to the last stake we might take a couple extra turns, and now we come back
going around on the alternate side.
When we get to the end, a couple extra turns with the string, and then we can cut it.
Then just tie it off.
Today we've been talking about basket weaving your tomatoes.
You may be asking yourself, "Why would I want to basket weave tomatoes?"
A couple of reasons.
Getting the tomatoes up off the ground, you're going to improve the fruit quality.
You're going to lose less fruit to rot.
You're going to lose less fruit to stepping on them.
It's going to be easier to find them, easier to harvest.
Also, having the plants up off the ground helps reduce the amount of foliar diseases
that the plants will experience.
Most commercial tomato production now is done on some sort of basket weave system.
It's something that can work well for a home garden.
You'll see here we've got roughly 15 plants, maybe 20 plants.
We can do this with as few as six plants.
Other benefits of doing basket weaving compared to tying tomatoes or staking individual tomatoes,
you'll see for the 15 plants, we're only using six stakes, so we can reduce the number of
stakes we need.
In the end, you're going to have, basically, a hedge of tomatoes.
It's going to look neat, tidy, and it's going to be easy to go out and harvest.
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