How to Cut Tomatoes Down from a Trellis)

All right it is time to say goodbye to my tomato plants. So sad. Today we are going to cut out the tomato plants, pull them from the arch trellis and get ready for the next season. It's been such a fun time growing these tomatoes over the last few months but just like any good thing it has to come to an end. So let's dive into this video and take out these tomatoes and get ready for the cool season in the kitchen garden. Welcome to Gardnery. Garden plus ordinary equals Gardnery. Gardnery is here to make gardening an ordinary part of everybody's life once again. That includes you. So in the kitchen garden we love talking about growing fruiting plants. It's like the third step or fourth step in terms of learning to grow in the kitchen garden and tomatoes and cherry tomatoes especially are one of my favorite things to grow in the garden. But these little girls have grown up and enjoyed their full summer in the kitchen garden and it's time for them to come out. So we've been enjoying harvest from these plants since July and now they've kind of slowed down their production. Last year I let these girls stay in the garden all the way until the first frost and looking back in photos and things I really regretted it because starting right about now until mid-October they just don't look that great and they definitely slowed their production. So let's talk about the first few steps to do as you want to pull out when you want to pull out your fruiting plants from your warm season in the kitchen garden. So what I did first is the other day actually just yesterday I came in with my big Lake Crescent bowl and just harvested a ton of green tomatoes off of the vine. Now some of these might actually ripen indoors some of them may not I'm just going to experiment I'll put them out not stacked like this because they'll end up rotting but I'm going to put them out maybe on a windowsill or somewhere indoors and see how many will ripen. So that's the first step is try to get as much of the green tomatoes off the vine as possible. So I left a few the way I like to cut them is just to cut the whole truss rather than just you know each tomato on its own so I just kind of come in here to the fruiting truss and just cut the whole thing. As you can see these still have a good long time to ripen if you haven't seen our video about how long it takes for a tomato to ripen on the vine it takes about the same amount of time that it took the plant to grow in the first place so these still have a good amount of time to finish up and as you can see the vines down here are just kind of scraggly and not so great. So what I'm going to do I have these nice strong pruners I can prune off separate vines like this but the next step is actually I'm going to cut the plants right at the base of the soil line so I try to do this when possible I try to practice the no dig method and try to maintain the the web that is underneath the ground so a lot of times if I can manage it I try not to uproot an entire plant but instead just cut it right at the base of the soil so that whatever is going on underneath can stay the same because even though we can't see it there's a whole lot of life and stuff going on down there. So we're just going to cut right here at the base of the soil level you can see that leaves the stem in there and you can see that if I just spread out you can see the roots but that releases the plant from the soil level and that's the next step so we'll do that on all the plants is cut it right at the base of the soil. All right so we'll cut this one too right at the base all right and we got one more right here this one is a beast look how thick that is so you can see I didn't quite keep to my rule of keeping it to one main stem but at least it's only two but that one was so nice and thick look at that all right so that's step two is cut them from the base now we'll move on to the next step all right now what I'm going to do the next step is I'm actually going to cut them here in the middle what I found over the years is that if I try to pull out the whole vine in one piece it's way too much to handle so way back when if you watched our videos there was a time we were tying the plants to the trellis with twine that feels like ages ago now but I'm just going to cut in the midway and start to pull these out so there's the start and then if you see some green tomatoes that you want to keep you can always grab them off the vine and there's that so we got that side I can't tell you it kind of feels really good to do this like kind of therapeutic I just finished Marie Kondo training to become a KonMari consultant and I was reminded of her philosophy that you discard first so anytime you're wanting to do something or make a change the first thing you got to do is get rid of the old stuff so so we'll do the second step over here too which is to cut in the middle of the plant again there's twine here from way back in the beginning of June so fun to remember those days when these little plants were so small and young and we had no idea what would happen to the plant it's kind of fun to remember the full season of growth all right so we did that this one is actually more on that side of the trellis so I'm going to pull this one off got a few more green tomatoes here what do you guys think are the green tomatoes going to ripen indoors I'm not sure I've been getting so many of you guys on Instagram when I told you I was going to pull out my tomatoes telling me all the recipes green tomato relish fried green tomatoes green tomato salsa I'm like do you guys think I cook or something are all crazy even my mom's sending me green tomato recipes so no one wants these to go to waste I can tell that all right let's see we're almost done with this step as you can see sometimes it takes almost feels like it takes as long to get rid of what you grew as it did to grow it in the first place all right so that's step two I'm going to finish up and then we'll do the final step here we go this one's really um this one I think might have been the most productive plant look at that even this is the sun gold and I think it got the most amount of sun um you can just tell how look at how thick that main stem is it's such a sign of health for a tomato plant so definitely enjoy growing that one this year all right so that is step what step are we on two three so first harvest the green tomatoes then cut at the base then cut in the middle and now we're going to do the hard work we're going to cut right at the top and try not to get hit in the face with tomato juice which I just did and here we go let's see this is going to be so sad to uh to take all this off so I have to say last year I let a first snow we had a snow in October an early snow and that's what killed all these plants because I left them in for too long and I really regretted that because it was so gross the plants were just so destroyed by the snow that it actually wasn't it wasn't easy or fun to take it out not that this is necessarily fun but this is definitely more enjoyable and I'm not freezing so all right we're almost there so I'm going to go lift through here once the um once the tomatoes got up here I wasn't really tying them anymore so you can see they're not really attached they're just oh actually I take that back that one I did tie all right here we go one half off the trellis is like oh my gosh I'm bare cover me up so you can see I still have a good bit of green tomatoes that I didn't quite get off so I can just go through here and clean them off no biggie and we got a couple here's a little bit of twine it's really fun to remember I think this was probably I'll have to look back at the videos but I think this was probably mid-July when um when the plants were right about this point so it's fun to look back and think through like what we were doing as a family and uh what was going on at the time when the plants were reaching each of those spots one of the neat things I love about the kitchen garden plants is that because they're so dynamic you can really you know remember things you were doing and activities and life changes with your plants because um you're literally changing day after day all right oh my gosh my little lovely trellis is bare um one more one little trick that I do with the twine is I don't tie it in a knot I just tie it in a bow and then you can untie it pretty easily all right friends we've done it what do you think it's kind of sad isn't it it's the closing of a season and the beginning of a new one which is um kind of bittersweet but exciting at the same time all right let's check out all the stuff we just pulled out of here you ready oh my gosh this is crazy so all this grew from four plants and this doesn't include all the fruit that we've pulled off these plants and all the leaves and things I've pruned off over the last four months so pretty incredible what can happen from just four little seeds if you think about it this all came from four tiny cherry tomato seeds so awesome all right thanks for watching gardenary I hope this inspires you to enjoy the magic of the kitchen garden every single season make sure you take the green thumb quiz at gardenary.com slash quiz the link is below this video we're going to ask you just a few simple questions and we'll help you figure out where you are in your gardening journey and then we'll give you some awesome resources to help you grow to the next level now if you'll excuse me I gotta go deal with something see you later thanks for watching gardenary