I'm Ron Patterson with Utah State University Extension in Carbon County.
Two of the more popular plants we grow in our vegetable gardens are cucumbers and tomatoes.
The problem that we have is when we have only small garden spaces, they just take up too
much room.
So I'm going to cover a couple of tricks that we can use to use your garden space more effectively
and...and get more production in a square foot of garden.
One of the things you can do with your tomatoes, of course, is cage them and that works with
your determinate, or bush-type, tomatoes.
They'll grow well; they keep kind of contained in a cage.
But if you like the indeterminate type tomatoes - most of your heirloom varieties are indeterminate,
most of your cherry tomatoes varieties are indeterminate - and a number of the other
good varieties are an indeterminate tomato.
Which means that the vine just keeps growing, it's a vining tomato - it just keeps growing
and growing and growing and growing until something kills it - then the cage doesn't
really work for those.
So what I'm going to cover today is how to build a trellis for your tomatoes and your
cucumbers.
Some of the tools that you'll need are some PVC cutters - just a ratchet-type PVC cutter
- to cut your PVC pipe; you'll need a post pounder, this is an old post pounder but it
works well; a pocketknife always comes in handy, so I'll put that back in my pocket;
a hammer of sort for pounding down the stakes, and then some of the other supplies that will
come in handy is a piece of twine, one inch schedule 40 PVC, and then here's the nice
little piece that's called a "saddle T", a PVC saddle T, basically what's going to happen
is you're going to snap that up into your piece.
Makes it so that you don't have to do so many joints to make things come together.
So a saddle T is a very handy thing to have.
And then finally, your regular steel T post that you get from a farm store, or places
that sell that kind of supply.
That's all you'll need for supplies, now if you're going to build an eight foot - for
example I'm going to put together an eight foot tomato trellis and an eight foot cucumber
trellis - for that, the supplies that I will need is five of the T posts, three lengths
of the schedule 40 - one inch schedule 40 PVC - and six of these saddle T's.
So that's the materials that we'll need to put it together, and once you've got your
pieces cut, it's pretty slick.
What you'll need on the PVC is to cut one of the lengths - they come in 20 foot lengths
- one into ten, two ten foot lengths, and then cut the other two into six and a half
foot lengths.
That way you'll use up the full material and you'll have enough for the two trellises.
Okay so I've got my garden soil worked up ready to go; it's early spring, I'm not ready
to plant yet, I'm just getting excited and ready to go.
It gives me something to do before the plants will survive outside.
So I've got the soil worked up, I've got it laid out here, I've got some...I've got some
stakes with some twine right there to give me a good straight line - I guess that's the
farmer in me, got to have good straight lines - and now I'm ready to put in my T posts.
What I'll do is I'll set a T post every four feet.
So I'll set one here, another one four feet and another one four feet, that'll give me
eight feet of row.
With the cucumbers, I only need to have two T posts, so I'll have one, and then another
one at eight feet.
So, here we go.
Okay, now I've got my T posts set, and these posts can be five and half, six foot T posts,
they don't have to be big, long, tall ones, and I'm going to put my uprights...fasten
my uprights to these T posts.
To do that, I'll just set it right there, I like to leave the knobs exposed and I'll
show you why in just a little while, and you just tie those on.
Make sure you use a square knot and not a granny knot.
Aw, it doesn't matter [laughs quietly].
All right, here's where the pocketknife comes in handy; and it's nice if it's sharp.
Now because some of these are bowed - they're used PVC pipe and so they're a little bit
bowed - so I will put three ties on them, you can probably get away with two: one down
lowish and one kinda high.
I put three ties on it; you can put two or three, doesn't matter.
One is probably not going to be enough, so you'll need to have at least two or three
ties on your uprights.
You'll notice that I've got three T posts on one, and only two on the other; the cucumbers
is the trellis that has just the two posts, and the reason for that is that the tomatoes
are so much heavier, that I've found that I need to have that T post in the middle.
In the past, I've just done it with just an upright that's just kinda been supportive,
but it's just so heavy that bows things and just sags down.
Tomatoes are a lot heavier; the cucumbers can go without having that third T post in.
So I'm ready to put my crosspiece on over the top here and the nice thing about these...nice
thing about these saddle fittings is that they just pop right in.
Notice that when I snap these into place I leave about a foot out on the end; these will
tend to pull through with the weight of the tomatoes if you have them too close, so that
foot of gap right there...or stick over on the end is...is pretty important to keep your
trellis standing.
Also notice that on the cucumber trellis, I do have a middle support post, it's just
not tied to a T post, so I've got the support there it just doesn't need to be quite as
strong.
The other thing to keep in mind is with PVC it will break down in sunlight, so if you
want it to last a little longer you can paint it with some exterior latex paint and that
will help it to last three or four years longer than if you just have it exposed to the sunlight.
Now in between each of these uprights, I can put two plants.
So they're basically going to be two feet apart between the plants.
When normally you plant your tomatoes in the garden, you're looking at three to four between
the plants, so you're actually getting more plants between, and then your production is
going up.
So what we use to train these plants to go up is I'll just tie a piece of this twine
up here above where I'm going to plant my plant, pull out my all-purpose pocketknife
tool, come down to about where I'll need it, cut it off, do another.
On the tomato trellis, the tomatoes are fairly tough plants, once they get planted and so
you can fasten these to the twine down here, and the wind doesn't typically cause a problem.
With the cucumbers, I've fastened that down there to the cucumbers, the wind tends to
twist, and flop around, and the cucumbers don't tolerate that nearly as well.
So the thing I've figure out to do there is to put a bottom piece to make that more rigid.
That's why I like to keep the knobs exposed, keep my PVC on the other side.
So here I have half inch PVC, it can be a schedule 40, or lighter weight even if you
want, then basically you're just going to tie that down very quickly - get my pocketknife
out again; always putting my pocketknife away so I don't lose it.
And then all I need to do now is just tie my twine to the PVC so that it's good and
sturdy; that way the cucumber starts to grow up.
When it gets to a certain size it's going to be a little bit top heavy, it'll want to
start flopping over a little bit, so that's when you can start fastening it to the twine...train
it up the twine.
So here I have trellises for my tomatoes and my cucumbers; nice thing about the trellis
is it keeps the fruit up off the ground so it doesn't get dirty, it's a lot easier to
see.
You do have to kind of shade the tomatoes a little bit because they sun scald with a
trellis system, so that's something to kind of keep in mind.
But I'm ready to go have fun in my garden.