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Hi, I'm Mark Hutton, University of Maine Cooperative Extension Vegetable Specialist.
What I'd like to talk to you about today is one of the ways you can trellis your indeterminate
tomato varieties for at home.
You can build a trellis using many different types of material.
The particular trellis I've built here, we're using some angle iron that's drilled out.
These have been pounded into the ground about two feet.
A 4x4 post would work, or any other kind of tall fencepost.
And then we've taken a heavy nine-gauge wire and stretched across the top.
I've also seen this done with 2x4s across the top, on top of 4x4 posts.
Then from our wire, we're hanging a string down to our plants.
Now, these plants don't look quite as big as what you may normally expect to see in
your home garden.
We've pruned these back to a single stem, and we've been wrapping the stem around this
string as the plant grows.
And we want to keep it fairly tight.
We don't want to take off too much foliage, we're not taking off any foliage, but we are
removing the suckers that are coming out from the leaf axils.
So, if you look at this plant, you can see we've got a sucker coming off right here.
This is what we're going to be removing.
So we can simply just snap that off.
And we keep these pruned all the way up.
Oops, here's one down here that we've missed.
And as the plant grows, it'll continue to try and put out more suckers, but we'll just
keep removing those, and we'll very carefully wrap the stem around the string as the plant
grows taller.
Now, when we wrap and when we prune, we never want to prune off the last sucker at the top
of the plant.
So here's our last sucker here.
We want to leave this on until the plant grows a little bit taller.
If, for instance, you can see here that the tip of this plant has broken off, so we're
going to rely on the next lowest sucker that's still on the plant may become our new growing
point, our new stem leading up the vine.
But we'll wrap this around just to see.
Maybe it's going to be all right.
Here's another sucker down here that we want to just very carefully just snap off.
Now, we can prune these plants to a single stem.
You see, our plant spacing here is about 18 inches.
Another option for trellising tomatoes would be to trellis our tomatoes with two stems,
rather than a single stem.
If you're going to trellis your plants to two stems, we're going to treat these individual
plants really as two plants.
So you notice that we've opened up the plant spacing.
When we're at a single stem, we were at about 15 to 18-inch spacing.
Now, we're at about a three-foot spacing between plants.
Basically we're going to treat these, as I said, as two separate plants.
So, we're going to keep two main branches on our plant.
And the branches that we're going to keep will be the main branch that has the first
flower cluster.
Our second branch will be the lowest branch that comes out beneath the first flower cluster.
We call that the fork.
That way we have the two branches trellising up, and then we're going to again keep all
the suckers, which are the stems or small branches in the leaf axils.
Here's our leaf, here's our sucker.
We're going to keep those removed.
What's going to happen with those is they'll grow and take energy from the plant.
Eventually they'll produce some fruit.
But for us here in New England, by the time these suckers produce fruit that we could
eat, it's really going to be too late in the season.
So, here you can see we've got a tomato plant.
This is an indeterminate tomato plant, the vining-type tomato plant.
And you can see our main stem, which has the flower clusters on the stem.
And here we see, we've got a couple hands of fruit that have set.
And then at each leaf, we often have a small branch.
-- we refer to these as suckers -- starting to grow.
So here we can see a fairly large one.
Here's a smaller one.
And when we talk about pruning tomatoes, what we're talking about is removing these suckers.
In this case, we're pruning our plant to just a single, very strong stem.
It's what's going to have our flower clusters, that's where our fruit is going to be.
If we were to leave these suckers to develop, eventually they'll get flowers and they'll
set fruit.
But usually, it's going to be very far out, and it's taking a lot of energy away from
the main plant.
So, we want to go through, if we're pruning to a single stem, and remove all those suckers.
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