Hi, this is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com.
I have a very special treat for today.
I was at my local farmers market here and I met Tyler Tebridge from Future Farms and,
you know, we got to talk about growing food and stuff and he’s like, “Hey man why
don’t you come check out my farm.”
So I was like “Yeah, it’d be great for my viewers to see what a real farmer is doing.”
And amazingly enough he’s using this square foot garden method so I got really excited.
Let’s go talk about your tomatoes.
Your tomatoes are looking really good and you’ve got a special technique you use on
the tomatoes, right?
Yes I do.
I follow the square foot gardening technique of single stemmed tomato growing, and you
put all your energy into one stem instead of letting them bush out.
Cool, well let’s go check it out.
Tyler has a totally different aspect than I. I have the aspect or opinion of letting
things grow and let them do what they’re going to do.
Number one, it’s a lot less labor, because if you’re going to do what he has to do,
it takes a lot of time to come out and pluck each branch and then if you forget one day
and then it overgrows then you got to pluck a lot.
Well anyways, let’s hear what he has to say and then maybe one day when I get more
time I’ll grow like he does because it does look really cool.
So Tyler, tell us what we’re doing here with your tomatoes.
So I’m growing my tomatoes up a single stem and you give one tomato one square foot.
The idea is that if you have a tomato plant growing up, all of its energy is going to
one stem.
It will have the same exact root ball that it would have for the twenty different vines
than you would have if you would just let it bush out.
Same root ball, but now you just have one stem instead of twenty so it’s sending all
of that energy into that single stem which will produce a healthier fruit.
You’ll get tomatoes faster and it should ripen quicker.
So, that’s sort of the theory behind it.
If you’re going to use the square foot system and you let your tomatoes bush out it takes
up about 9 sq feet per plant and this method right here takes up just one square foot.
So here’s a good example of what I’m talking about.
This is four different tomato plants right here.
Each in one square foot.
If you can imagine one tomato plant not being trimmed it would take up this whole area,
nine square feet.
It would bush out that much.
But I’ve got four different plants growing in only four square feet.
What you got to wrap your mind around is that you are having more plants for less square
feet which means more tomatoes.
I mean this is chockfull of tomatoes right here and if you had a plant that was just
bushed out like crazy, that’s fine too.
You’d probably get the same amount of tomatoes but you’re taking up more area, and you’re
shading out other crops.
Now you can see I’ve got all these tomatoes on this stem right here.
It’s chockfull of them.
They’re going to turn its going to be fine they’re just like a regular bush tomato.
All I do is take away the side shoots.
But look at all the space I have for my eggplants.
You can see my eggplants are getting full sun which is exactly what they need.
There’s no shading.
If you’re using traditional row crops, if you’re going to just grow a whole row of
tomatoes, it’s fine to let them bush out.
There’s no problem.
You can let the tomatoes compete against each other.
But if you’re using the square foot method, you’re growing different crops in a very
small area.
And for that reason you have to let plants get the sunlight and the sun exposure that
they need and that’s why we use this single stem.
That’s why we want to create some exposure and also give more energy to a single plant.
All right, so show us how you do this Tyler.
Okay so, I’ll take you through a couple plants and like John was saying it is a lot
of work I’d say.
For me it’s a lot of work because I’m a farmer so I’ve got about 30 different
tomato plants which isn’t even that many.
Yeah, you go out about once or twice a week and you just trim back the side shoots.
It only takes about an hour.
So here’s the side shoot right here and what they do is they grow in the spots in
between the leaf and a stem and all you got to do is just rip it out.
But look you’re giving up all these potential tomatoes right here.
The reason why you’re doing that though is because you want the energy to go into
the fruit that’s already there.
This might not even make it to the season’s end.
This one little stem right here would grow and do a whole new tomato.
I mean this stem is essentially what this would be as well, you know what I mean.
This will grow into its own really large vine and essentially you’re taking up space and
you can see right here this is another side shoot right here.
They’re called suckers right.
Suckers, it’s coming in through this stem so its creating another tomato vine and I
don’t want that because I don’t want it to take up space.
I d sacrifice a few tomatoes to allow my other plants to get their sun and like I said, more
energy to the tomato that’s growing there.
Let make take you to the other side and I’ll show you another example of a rather large
vine and the reason this is so big is because I haven’t had the time to get out here.
I might actually…
let’s see did I have the intention to… all right I’ll explain this.
It looks like last week I discovered that there was really large sucker, or whatever
you like to call them, growing out of the main stem, as you can see this is the main
stem right here.
If you follow my finger.
And I like to call them little armpits.
In the armpit of the leaf and the main stem, that’s the sucker.
That right there would become a huge vine.
And that’s fine if you want to let it vine out that’s your choice but I don’t want
it so I take it and just peel it off, like that.
It’s really easy.
They call it pinching, it’s not really pinching, it’s kind of wiggling until it falls off.
Now this side sucker right here -- the reason why I didn’t take it out was because I discovered
it, not too late, I just found that it had a bunch of flowers that were already flowering
so what I did is I chopped it off.
There was a whole vine growing here and I just chopped that off.
So this won’t grow anymore vine.
This is done now.
It’s going to just produce some tomatoes right here where you see these flowers and
thus if I would’ve not chopped it off here this would’ve vined out like crazy.
Which is okay, if you want that, if that’s how you want to do it.
Another technique that a lot of farmers do -- I’ll show you.
Here’s another example, a perfect example of a side shoot coming up.
There’s two of them here.
And these things grow fast.
In 90 degree weather this thing in 2 or 3 days would be twice the size.
Under the right conditions these vines just grow like crazy.
So what you do is just wiggle it back and forth, take it off, like that.
And you see the other one growing here on the armpit.
Wiggle it, take it off.
Trim your tomatoes.
And even if you do what John was saying, the bush variety, where you just let it go crazy.
Towards the end of the season it’s a really good idea to start trimming back those extra
vines.
The reason is because you want to get your fruit to ripen by the frost and let me show
you two things to keep in mind.
Like what I just did here is I made a mistake.
If you’re not delicate around the flowers you can sometimes break them off.
That’s a tomato that’s now broken off.
Not a big deal, it happens.
If you’re going to vine your tomatoes be very very aware of the flowers.
They’re really delicate and they break very easily.
And it’s really frustrating if you’re breaking them.
When you’re weaving them in and out of the trellis setting, just be very careful and
if you’re afraid to weave it just take some nylon string or some thick string and just
tie them to the trellis.
Just be very aware that the flower is where the tomato is going to go.
Let’s see this is what a lot of farmers do at the end of a season.
So.
Today is September 11th.
Now, I’m sort of debating whether or not I should do this.
Just because I am not sure when our frost is coming.
Last year our frost was somewhere around October 30 and November 5th.
What a lot of growers will do is they will actually top off their tomato plants and a
lot of single stem growers.
It’s really easy to do if you’re growing a single stem and what that means is you just
cut the top of the vine and that’s where its producing its new vine and new fruit and
you can see actually the new fruit coming in right here.
The flowers.
Those will become tomatoes.
If you chop it off there, it’s not going to grow anymore.
So all that energy is going to go into these fifteen tomatoes right here.
An d you know if you’ve got 15 tomatoes and 15 tomatoes here, 15 here, you’ve got
sixty tomatoes on a four by four foot trellis.
All of that energy is going to hopefully get you tomatoes before the last of the first
frost.
A lot of tomatoes plant will survive a few light frosts.
My point is that a lot of single stemmed growers will and bush growers will top off their tomato
plants at the end of the season just because they want that fruit to set.
You can see I’ve got some little tomatoes here and it would probably be a very good
idea to top off the plant.
That way no more energy is going into the production of new vines.
Now with that said if you do top off the plant you still have to go around to the armpits,
is what I call them, or the area between the stem and the leaves, and peel back those suckers.
Here’s a devil sucker it looks like he went through this armpit, you got it, and now it’s
just like hey I’m growing another one sucker.
Exactly.
Here you go, you just pull it off right there.
Easy.
And like I was saying.
If this is the single stem even if you have topped off the plant, the plants biological
and genetic trait is to make new vines.
It wants to create as much fruit as possible.
The problem is that our weather isn’t conducive for the tomato plant to grow year round.
If this was in tropical region we could let these plants just vine for ages.
But no, we have a specific time parameter in which we can grow our tomatoes and that’s
why we go to these extraordinary lengths to ensure that we get a healthy harvest.
My main point is that even if you have topped off the tomato plant, it’s still going to
continue to grow new side suckers.
Cool.
I definitely agree with what Tyler is saying.
He grows, looks like, I see maybe a couple of cherry varieties.
He grows a lot of big tomatoes and if you’re growing a lot of big tomatoes and I don’t
because I don’t have luck with them probably because I haven’t done this single stem
method, if you do grow big tomatoes id probably encourage the single stem tomatoes but if
you’re growing cherries I probably wouldn’t recommend it so much because cherries produce
so many flowers and they produce fruit so quick so if you can’t have a lot of suckers
then you’re fruits going to be ripe and then you’re not going to have any more flowers
to grow.
What do you think about that Tyler?
There’s a reason why John is correct there and it’s that there are two different types
of tomatoes.
There’s determinate tomatoes and indeterminate and there are varieties of cherry tomatoes
that are indeterminate, but most cherry tomato varieties are determinate plants.
So that means that all of their fruit bears at the same time and generally they’ll go
through 2 or 3 cycles of bearing fruit so it’s kind of contradictive to what I just
said, but it will be within a few weeks.
The first fruit is really good the second one is not as good and the third one you have
even less.
So what that means is that you see all these flowers on this vine this is just going to
keep vining.
A determinate tomato plant, like a cherry tomato, all those flowers are flowering and
blossoming at the same time.
You’re going to get your tomato around the same time, which is really nice.
Commercial growers grow a lot of determinate big varieties because they can go through
there with their machines and just pick up the tomatoes right out.
Because they’re all ripe at the same time, but with the indeterminate varieties you’re
going to get one ripe on a vine and you won’t get another for a week or so.
If you want to take a look here you can see how many you can kind of just follow up the
stem.
You know you’ve got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven,
twelve tomatoes on one plant and you go over here and you’ve got another 10 over here
so I mean you’re getting about…
I honestly can’t say how many tomatoes I’m going to get from just this four by four foot
plant.
And that’s four plants.
You might even get up to 60 tomatoes maybe even more under perfect growing conditions
maybe 100 tomatoes.
So here’s one of Tyler’s plants here which is a single stem and you can take a look here
and this thing’s loaded with tomatoes I mean they all ripen up at different times.
This one looks like it’s ready to get harvested here and just follow the stem up and you can
see here there’s nice clusters at each different points.
Lots of tomatoes that are going to ripen up.
So you can really yield a lot of produce with one tomato plant if you do the right method.
You know as I said many times I encourage people to grow the cherry tomatoes because
they’re more hassle free I find that you’ll have better success especially if you don’t
have the nice heat and not really stay on top of it like Tyler does here, so lazy man
tomatoes are cherry tomatoes.
And that’s my tomato.
They’re easy to grow and they taste really good too.
There’s nothing wrong with letting your plants bush.
I hoped you’ve enjoyed our visit here to Future Farm with Tyler here and he’s invited
me to come back for future episodes.
He’s open to having people visit his farm and share his knowledge through email.
You could contact him at helpingyougrow@gmail.com So, once again this is John Kohler from growingyourgreens.com
and keep on growing!