My 7ft Tomato Promise Turned Into a 13ft Twin-Engine Monster!

Good morning and welcome back to Kevin's Kitchen Corner. I don't know if you saw one of the first videos that I did when I put my garden in, but at that time when I planted my first tomato plant, I planted it about five or six inches deep and I promised you a seven foot tomato plant. So what I'd like to show you is how I engineered a deep root system and my pruning techniques so that instead of a seven foot plant, we now have a 13 foot massive giant tomato plant. So what I need to do is I need to ask you to stick around for the whole video because I want to show you the underground engineering and pruning tips that I use to grow this massive 13 foot giant. So let's start with how we did the underground part of when we planted the tomato. So what we did was when we planted the eight inch tomato, maybe a little bit larger than that, we actually planted this down about five inches, even covering the first couple of branches. What that did was that created a root ball way down deep instead of just planting it at the top. So if you've got that five inches down, we put in a PVC pipe and down in where that root ball is, we drilled holes in that. So now I do all my watering. I do all of my fertilizing through this. So when I use the PVC tube and got that deep rooting system, right now that root ball is actually about 20 inches wide and 12 to 15 inches deep. So then as we fertilize and we watered, as this plant got bigger, we pruned off some of the lower branches to start with. And I'm going to show you why you need to do that. Here's a cup that I had in a different part of my garden. We had some cucumber beetles and I had to put a solution in there and I just spread it throughout the regular part of my garden. If you look at all of this dirt, that's what actually splashed up from the dirt in the other part of the garden and got onto this cup. If you leave all of the leaves down here and the water hits in this area and it splashes up, this actually carries a lot of bacteria. It can create a fungus. So you want to get all those leaves pruned up here. Then we had some small tomatoes that came in. We picked those. This is the part I want to show you. Once you get the tomato here, then you want to find a sucker above that and you're going to let, this was actually a sucker. Let that grow. And then any suckers above that, we'll go ahead and prune those off. But by doing this, we created a Y. And if you look at the size of this and the size of this, basically what we've created is a double highway that we can use to have all the fertilizers come up and do this side of the plant and this side of the plant. And basically they're the exact same size and we're getting tomatoes on both of these. So as we got the Y system growing, we had some tomato plant or some tomatoes here. We had some tomatoes here and then you can see we have another batch here, another one here, and another one here. So as these grow up, what we need to do is we need to continue pruning the leaves off because we need all of that energy from the fertilizer in the water to keep growing up the plant, not go into the leaves, not go into branches. And we actually don't want it to go into these fruits once they're fully formed. So you go up the tomato plants. We've got more here. We've got more here. We're suckering. Here's a sucker here. We need to sucker these very aggressively because we do not want anything more going into the plant itself. You can see we got above this cage here. So we actually had to build a homemade trellis that goes on both sides of the bed. This is about six and a half foot tall. And what we used to support the tomatoes when they got above here, we put a double string, tied it to the top, and then we use these clips here, hooked it on the string, put it onto the branch, and that is going to just support these tomatoes. And then as we keep going up, we have to use another ring. The rings look like this, and I will put a link in the description. You can get 300 of these, or right now I think they're on sale for like $10. So what we need to do is we need to come up here, put that around there, and then just take that, close it, and it just clips together like that. That's going to support these blossoms here. Now this plant is actually going to grow probably another one to two feet. And you can see that on the other side, we basically have the exact same vine and we're growing the tomatoes. So if you think about it, down here we have one foot. This side of the tomato plant right now is six foot. The other side is six foot. So six to six is 12 and one foot. We have a 13 foot tomato plant. Like I say, this is going to grow another two feet, probably on both sides. So if you add that, you add another four feet. So we're going to have a 17 foot tomato plant, but we really, really need to concentrate on getting any suckers that are growing that we need to make sure that they come out. So all we're going to do is have everything, there's a sucker, need to pinch that off. So everything needs to go into that fruit, not into the plant. So like I say, it's not a seven foot tomato plant. Right now it's 13, probably going to grow to 16 or 17 feet. So thanks for stopping into Kevin's Kitchen Corner. I hope you enjoyed this video. Don't forget at Kevin's Kitchen Corner, we don't just cook, we don't plant, we create. Don't forget to hit the thumbs up, the subscribe, the like. And if you have any questions or give me ideas on how you grow your tomato plants, just enter them in the comments. Take care.