Of Tomatoes and Wire Cages

In the summer of 2008 I planted about 18 tomato plants, far too many for my wife and me, if they had all yielded fruits as they should have. "Fortunately" for us they did not. I planted mainly Brandywines and Moskviches, and a few grape tomatoes, but then added a couple Cherokee purples, John Bauer, and a Moonglow.  Two lessons observed:

A)  I spent too much time watering by hand, standing there holding the garden hose in hand, trying to guesstimate how much water I was delivering to each plant. Later in the summer I ran water into a bucket of known capacity several times, timing how many seconds it took, and then using that as a basis for counting the seconds I was watering each plant.  I had problems with blossom end blight in many of the plants. Was I overwatering them?

    In 2009 I installed a drip irrigation system that enabled me to better control the delivery of water to the crops under a layer of mulch.

B)  These were all indeterminate plants - vines that grew and grew. I was using those wire cages you buy at the Big Box stores, and they proved to be entirely inadequate: far too small and flimsy. As the plants got larger they bent the cages over and I rushed to cut some poles that I tied to the cages to hold them upright, sort of. And the plants just plain outgrew the cages (these were the larger cages - about 4 1/2 or 5 feet tall). Some of the plants just plain bent over, the poles weren't sufficient to hold the cages.  And the cage wires were cutting into the limbs of some of the plants.

    Again, in 2009 I started the year by cutting some pole trees and trimming them 8- or 9-foot lengths and plunged them into the ground before planting each tomato transplant. I then tied the growing plants to the poles using lengths of cloth in a figure 8 pattern. That worked much better, but I still have to plant the tomatoes a little further apart next year. And work better at trimming them.

    Of course this year while the east coast suffered from the "late blight", we suffered from a cool summer. My tomatoes (Brandywines and Moskviches, 3 grape plants) were almost all green even into September. Finally my wife and I went out and harvested the green fruits, put them in boxes, and covered them. Almost all of them ripened within 2 or 3 weeks, especially if we put a banana in the box with them. We wound up with a most gratifying harvest after all.  And I also planted fewer tomatoes this years, and they still provided us with a plentiful harvest.

    Next year, though, I want to start 4 determinate bush plants in late April in the hoop house. I'm hoping the early start will enable me to start harvesting tomatoes a month earlier, maybe by sometime in late July.