How to Grow Tomatoes: Staking

Hi, I'm Mark Hutton, University of Maine Cooperative Extension Vegetable Specialist, and today we're going to talk about staking individual tomato plants. Now this is something that many home gardeners will do. We're going to prune our plants to a single stem by removing the suckers. And you might ask, what are the suckers? The suckers are these branches that come off the main stem. The main stem is the part of the plant that has most of the fruit clusters. You'll see that they will sometimes have a fruit cluster, but it's much weaker than the main stem. And so the fruit quality that you get off these suckers just isn't going to be as good. So you're better off, if you can, if you have the time or the inclination, to remove these. This one's a little bit too big to snap off, so I'm going to cut it. Very simply, you don't want to damage the plant when you pull these off. So how are we going to tie these to our stakes? Well, you can see here I'm using strips of rag. It's a soft cloth. We don't want to use string. This is an old t-shirt. It's a little bit stretchy. Other things that work really well are old nylons or pantyhose, because they're not going to rot. What you want to stay away from is some sort of string that may eventually cut the plant. When we tie the plant, we're going to take our tie around the plant, make a small loop in it before we tie it to our stake. And we can just simply tie it off any way you want. Now that loop is to keep it from sliding up and down on the stem and abrading the stem. And we don't want to tie it too tight. We want to have it just tight enough so that it stays up against the stake. So staking individual tomato plants is something that you're going to want to do just with the indeterminate varieties of tomatoes, so the beefsteak types of tomatoes. It's a little bit labor intensive to do with the wild growing small cherry tomatoes, things like that. And for the determinate or bush plants, this isn't going to be a very effective way to stake them. If you just have a few plants, this is a perfectly acceptable way to go. If you're growing more tomato plants, it would suggest that perhaps you look at using the basket weave or the trellising cable trellis system. Here we've got another plant, another stem that we should tie up. We're just going to do that before we move on. Notice we make a little twist and then just simply tie it off, tie our section of rag off. When we're going through pruning, tying, and or trellising our tomato plants, we want to be sure to try and leave as much foliage on the plant as we can to protect the fruit from sun burning. You see here we've got some fairly nice leaf cover over that fruit that's going to help keep it shaded and keep it from getting sunburned. As we start to work up the plant and the fruits start to mature and we're harvesting further and further up the plant, we can start removing or de-leafing those lower leaves, anything below the last ripening fruit cluster.