Welcome to the Simple Garden Life Podcast, a program dedicated to keeping the yard
of gardening simple, fun and always rewarding. Now Here are your hosts,
Jim and Mary Competti. Hello and welcome everybody to the Simple Garden Life Podcast.
I am your host, Jim Competti, along with my co host Mary
Competti. And Mary, you're pretty excited today to talk about tomatoes. Absolutely,
garden teams close. It is close, and today's subject is really one
of what are our favorites? It is and I think some of it's because
it was accidental how we kind of hampered across this. But we always get
people asking us every year about what's the best way to support tomato plants?
You know, what's the perfect solution. Well, today we're going to talk
about it, and it really is easy and it covers all the things we
talk about. You know, there's just little doubt how important it is to
support your tomato plants in the correct way. And our question of the week,
which we'll get to later, is just about this, like why do
you have to? And I love that that we've added that. I love
that the question came in. But for us, tomato cage is the very
first time we ever painted our garden. I guess we got to kind of
tell the funny story. So Mary and I did what we always tell people
not to do now, which is don't plant everything under the sun. Absolutely,
our garden gets way too big. Yeah, And so in the early
years, we were excited about tomato growing because we love them and we wanted
to make lots of salsa and pasta and eat them in a salad. So
we planted I think around forty eight tomato plants. Way too many. Yeah,
I mean, it's just like we were not feeding the entire city,
but we planted them. So we planted them on day one. And we
don't do this anymore because now we put our tomato supports in right away.
But we planted them and then quickly realized, wow, we're going to have
to steak these, and that's when we started looking around at stores. Right
and then we got sticker shock. Oh, sticker shock, because you could
buy some tomato cages back then, that's fourteen years ago, ten twelve dollars
apiece. They were flimsy. You could buy some other ones for twenty dollars
apiece. It didn't take a rocket science to figure out that fifty times ten
was five hundred dollars. I might as well just buy my tomatoes, yeah,
at the local grocer, or wait till the farmer's market. So nonetheless,
we came up with a very simple solution. We'll get to that in
a second, but I want to kind of go back. That's kind of
really what started mary our trekdown how to build your own tomato supports, and
we tried to cover some of the things that are always a problem for a
lot of people, mainly the strength, the cost, the durability, how
long are they going to last? I mean, let's face it. You
know, we'll talk about this too. You get into tomato cages, you
what are you lucky to get out of them? You know, a couple
of years, right? They you know, a lot of times they'll break
within the first year, bend. They're a nightmare at a store over the
winter for the next garden season. Oh, I love that you say that.
I mean, we used to have stacks when we had them in the
old days of sideways and left and right, and as you said, they're
just not very strong. And then, you know, here's my problem with
tomato cages. And we talk about this all the time. The regular round
cages that you talk about. The very first thing that happens if you're growing
your tomatoes in the right way is when they start to grow, what happens
to the cage. It grows right out of the ground with the tomato,
and or it grows half out of the ground. In the first storm,
you get it topples over. And then you mentioned the storage issue with them,
and my biggest beef with tomato cages is that they're so hard to prune
your tomato plants. You can't find the fruit and if you do find the
fruit, you're trying to maneuver your hand between the wires to picket. They're
just not very user friendly. No, they're not. And they are still
expensive. And you said it best. They don't last very long. And
you know, we talk about tomato steaks. That's another option, and it's
one my dad used to use. You know, he would go out with
those big steaks and you're just talking about like a single steak, just a
single steak, and you know, you put it in the ground and you
tie it off. But I'd like, you know, to talk to people.
I wish my dad was still around so I could ask them. The
question how did you tie those to the steak, because it never worked.
The year we tried it, we were putting screws in the side and tying
to the screws right right, and you know, you try to grow your
plant upright, your tomato plant upright. You know, we all know about
the pantyhose and the t shirts to time off on. But when you tie
them to a single steak, it doesn't give room for the plant to breathe,
to get the sunlight, to get the air, to get the fruits
to ripen. And you can't tie every branch that you need to, so
they end up coming back down. And then the other support problem is they
too you know, if you're using wood steaks, they're going to break under
the weight, and you can't use treated lumber because you don't want those treated
lumber. So what happens is after one year, our first solution was,
you know, we use some pencil point surveyor steaks, so at least going
and wetach something to it. They were great at first, they were great,
but you know, no matter how much you try, they end up
you know, rotting off, and or I'd break it when I'd try to
drive it in and then last but not least. There are all other kind
of options we talk about this. There's oh tomato towers and people take make
the square cages that go way up just on. You go online right now
and you can find a million solutions. Oh yeah, but the problem is
they're just so expensive. I mean you're talking some of these are now twenty
dollars. You don't know if they're going to last. And again you get
right back to where we were, which was, wow, why are we
you know, why are we not just buying our tomatoes? I mean,
everybody loves to grow to their tomatoes, but you don't want to spend four
or five hundred dollars trying to support your tomatoes. No, not at all.
So okay, so why do you need to support tomatoes? So that
leads to our question of the week, which is which is really good?
And I love this? I think it's what Cindy Dumont Mary, Yes from
Gainesville, Georgia. Yeah, Cindy asks, I have plenty of garden space.
Why do I need to steak tomatoes? Can I just let them sprawl
out on the ground like I do with my cucumbers? You know, it's
a really great question, and we get that a lot. You just have
a neighbor that did that. Yeah, we did. And here's the problem.
The difference. There's a couple of differences with tomatoes, and even with
cucumbers. Sometimes we like to trell us our cucumbers for the very same reason.
With cucumbers, and you can put straw down, you can lay the
the fruit lays on top. It's a little bit easier picking quickly early in
the season. Tomatoes do not do that. Tomatoes take a very long time
to ripen. And while they're laying on that ground, even if you mulch
them, they are so easy to bruise. They're so easy to spot.
But more importantly, you have tomato b like to worry about, which is
a soil born disease, and it's laying right on the soil. It also
makes them wonderful for raccoons and other animals to come in and have a treat.
All different types of pests. Can you know they can climb right upon
all the soil, They can get your tomato plants, they can ruin your
tomato plants, And all that time that you could have spent staking your tomato
plants is now going to be ruined because your tomatoes are no longer good.
Yeah, and then let's go to the other aspect we talk about. You
know, the physical reasons why you should steak them, but there's also a
lot of reasons for health for your tomatoes themselves, not just because of the
blight. So tomatoes need air and oxygen, and the plants need air to
ripen, to create more flowers, to do all those things. When they're
laying on the ground and smash together, they get more moisture trapped. All
kinds of issues happen there. But you also don't get any type of airflow
that helps pollination. So if you let your tomatoes sprawl just by nature,
you're gonna have a lot less fruit because you're gonna have a lot less pollination.
Well, another point to that too is once you have your tomato plants
on the ground, the actual stem of the plant continues to create roots.
So as it's on the ground, you're creating more roots it can, and
that takes away from the actual plant and fruit production. Yeah. So,
I mean, great question, But you want to stake them, and it's
very easy, and that's what we're going to talk about. So what is
this perfect solution. Well, there is some good news. We talked about
this. It's a DIY solution to support your tomatoes. And it's not just
affordable, but as we found, they're really easy to make, really incredibly
strong, and they're so durable. Oh yeah, and this is something that
for us has developed. When we did our first ones, we used woodsteaks
and then we changed it. So we're super excited to tell you about this,
and you're gonna find out that. The other thing is these last forever.
I mean, we've had ours five six, seven years, going to
make it ten years easy and probably fifteen because they're just super durable. And
Mary's favorite thing of all is we're going to talk about how you put them
up and how you take them down, and how easy they are to store.
If you've ever stabbed yourself when you went into your shed or your garage
and there with tomato cages that are sticking out, you will not have that
problem. So we'll be right back after this and we're going to tell you
how to build your very own incredible tomato supports. And we are back and
it's time to talk about building your own DIY. Okay, we are back
and we're talking about how to build your own tomato supports on the on the
cheap, as we like to say it. But as always we want to
remind our listeners that you can always reach out to us at the farm at
ow garden dot com with your questions concerns about hey, how do I do
this or how do that or topics for future podcasts. We get a lot
of them in and we always love getting them, and again you can just
reach us there. You can also follow along on simple Garden on Facebook.
We put our updates there and we also have all kinds of great advice there,
and you can check out our YouTube channel at Old World Garden Farms where
we have all kinds of quick shorts about how to do everything from printing your
tomatoes to building razorow gardens and everything else. So all right, Mary,
let's get to the point of how to build your own steaks. And I
guess we kind of have to say that for revealing everything that we've used these
really for about fourteen years variations. Yeah, it's been an evolving process for
us, and you know, we looked at over the years of what works,
what could we do better? And I think we've come up to the
great solution. Yeah. I mean, so the last five years now we've
been using this solution, and I don't think I can't never say we'll never
improve one, because maybe some new thing will come out that we can do
with it. But for right now, this has just been phenomenal for us.
So when we first started building our own supports, we like to call
them steak of cages, and it really was kind of interesting go back to
that era when we had forty eight plants in the ground and realized we were
going to spend a fortune. We went out and bought five foot roll fencing
I think it was three foot road fencing, and then we bought some just
common steaks, yes, survey or stakes a pencil point, yeah, and
Mary cut eighteen inch sections from this road fencing and then we would use some
you nails or staples to stap them to the wood and they made look almost
look like a small radar. It did look like a radar in our garden,
but they were fantastic. We pounded them in the ground. You could
tie the tomatoes off to the open face of the of the fencing and it
was a little curve because of the role and I still remember how it looked,
but really really worked well. The issue, and Mary alluded to this
earlier, was after a year or two, especially storing, it was a
little bit easier because they went together, but there was still a lot of
space. But after a year or two, there's wood steaks just didn't work
right. By the time we'd pull them out of the ground to close our
garden for the year, a few of them would break off at the pencil
point, and you know, so we just had to kind of kind of
figure out a better solution. Yeah, and then the other problem was we
used the road fencing, but it was lightweight, and after about three or
four years, you know, it would have its own issue and sometimes even
in a couple of years we start to bend and Yeah, again, incredible
because it allows you to tie the plants off quickly and easily. Mary talked
about the cages and reaching through. That's not an issue with these years straightforward,
But we kept evolving and so what we've come to now, which like
I said, it's it's really probably the easiest way to make them and super
super strong. There is a little bit of cost up front, but it's
a cost when you we'll go through the cost of how we build these,
and we can build these for anywhere from ten to fifteen dollars each, comparable
very much to anything by the market, except when you factor in that they
can last for ten years, and they're way better, right, I mean,
the economical benefit of making these goes a long way, especially if you're
going to garden for more than one year. Exactly. I feel like we're
becoming one of those reality shows where we're not getting to the answer. So
let's let's go. So let's talk about how to make these supports and what's
what's all in them? So we make our supports now from two simple things.
A six foot long metal te post that you know is used for fences.
Is that a better way to say that, Mary, to talk about
what it is? No? I think you know. They come in different
sizes, six foot, eight foot, I think those are They're called tea
posts. They're metal. You just drive them in the ground. Yeah,
and you can. You can buy these at any local farm store or even
like your your local big box store will carry them. But the key is
to get the heavy duty. I'm just gonna say buy the six footers,
not the five or four footers. Because time you drive them in the ground,
they're just not tall enough. But I like them because they're super strong,
and you know, we'll get to the cost, but it's not very
much. I think these are you know, I think we bought ours for
like six fifty apiece. They're last forever. I mean, they're going to
last forever. They're heavy duty metal. You can pound them in, you
don't worry about them breaking. And then the second part of this we talked
about we used to use rolled fencing. Well we found out that hey,
let's make them a little stronger and get cow or goat pans. We like
livestock pans. Yeah, livestock pans. Okay, so they're all, oh
good. If you get a great deal on one, that's great. The
reason we say goat panels are the best and I like them is goat panels
start at the bottom a little bit smaller, and they go to the top
as you're spacing of the panels. And these are galvanized. I don't know
how thick they are. They're pretty pretty strong. They're thicker. These are
not real. Yes, these are strong panels that you can hold a goat
in, so you know how strong they are. Now what we do.
They come in sixteen foot sections, and you're like, well, I'm not
growing sixteen feet of tomatoes. You could put that sixteen foot section just down
your row and tie off. But what we like to do is we cut
those sections into twelve to eighteen inches wide and we use them I guess twelve
inches for our smaller tomatoes, and we use these for peppers. I mean,
they're fantastic for pepper pants too, right, we use it for both.
And then we do eighteen inches wide. We just use a pair of
bolt cutters. Metal cutters cut through them at eighteen inches wide. For our
larger airling tomatoes. The goat panels come forty two inches high, which is
perfect when you put them on. You can find some other of the cawpanails
that might be five foot high for they're all going to work. But I
really like that level and that thickness of these panels. And then here's the
beauty of this versus. I told you when we bought the wood panels,
we used to stay more you nail them. So what do we do now?
We go out in the spring before planning day, maybe a day before
maybe the day of, and we go right down the line where we're going
to have our tomatoes planted. And then what we do is use zip ties
to tie them off. Right. We actually used about three zip ties per
post. We do one at the bottom, one in the middle, one
at the top to hold it all together. Yeah. So you have this
panel, you have your metal post driven into the ground, which is very
easy to do when it's by itself, there's nothing attached to it. As
soon as that metal post is driven in and pe bus is how long you
drive twelve to eighteen inches. I like them deep because that's why I like
getting the six foot steaks. They go in a little bit deeper and they're
going to stay really strong. Actually, at the bottom of each steak is
kind of a horizontal piece. Yep. You drive that through the ground to
the soil. Yeah, it makes it's very easy for us to do that.
And then we just take these panels that are forty two inches high or
whatever height the panel you buy, but eighteen inches wide or twelve inches,
and we square them right to the middle, so the middle of the panel
goes to the middle of the post, so you have a little bit on
each side. We like it even Yeah, we like it even and your
plants will too. And you zip tie the bottom, middle, and top.
Then you plant your plant. And if I can give one bit of
advice, if there's one thing you can do to help your tomato plants is
please, no matter what you use, I don't even care if you use
kid, get your tomato supports in day one. Absolutely yeah. And because
of two things. Number one is your tomato plants when they're young need support.
People think, oh, I'm gonna let them grow for a while,
Well guess what the first wind comes along wipes it out or a big storm.
You've got to support them from day one. One. Tie off is
perfect at the bottom. That's what makes these so great because with with this
version of the t post and then the panel, you rest the panel on
the ground, you zip tie it then middle high, Well, that plant
is right down there low and you can tie it off right away, especially
with springstorms coming. You know, we've had a lot of storms lately,
and you know, if we had tomato plants in the ground right now,
they would be toping over if they didn't have that support. Absolutely, So
you know, once they go in and now you're set, and as the
tomato plant grows, up. You can just tie off to those little squares
so easy. We use either green yarn. Yarns are a little secret.
You can buy what a thousand feet for a couple of dollars and just the
stretch and it's nice and we tie it off. But you can use tomato
supports or whatever, tomato tie offs, whatever. But now you have this
perfect support system that allows it to grow high. Yeah, and I think
you know, we really need to reiterate to put your tomato supports in before
your plants, because if your tomatoes are in the ground and they have been
growing for a month before you decide to put them up, you are disturbing
the soil. You're hitting their roots when you're putting your tomato supports in.
That can damage your tomato plants and then you're yield. Yeah, there's no
way to know where your roots have grown underneath that soil. So you might
be thinking, oh, I'm behind the plant. You might be driving right
through one of the major routes. So that's a very good point to bring
up and why we do it. So now let's cover some a few quick
questions about how they grow. So it's great they grow up. You keep
tying them off. And people say, but I grow heirlooms and they grow
eighteen feet tall. Well, you can get an eighteen foot tall panel if
you want. But listen, you can prune your tomatoes at the top.
It actually helps them. They'll branch out a little more when ours get to
seven or eight feet or six feet. We prune off that top. You're
not going to harm them. So that's another answer. But the real beauty,
beyond the incredible support and the way that they hold the tomatoes and the
vines up, really for me is at the end of the season. Mary,
it comes at the end of the season when you go to take them
off because you just zip those zip tie or you just cut the zip ties.
And now how do you store them? Right? You know, we
cut the zip ties off, we clean off the things, clean off the
panels, we disinfect them. All you have to do then is actually stack
the panels together and then stack the posts. Yep, that's right. So
let's do one final thing before we end here. Let's talk about the final
cost for us. So I'm telling you right now we've had five plus years
of this system employed and we still are using the same things every year over
and over again. So you've got to factor that in. If you're buying
five dollars tomato supports for I don't even know where you'd find those, but
you're replacing them every year. After three years, you've spent fifteen dollars and
you're not getting very good support. So for us, the t posts,
as I said, usually six fifty to seven dollars at your local farm store.
You can find them heavy duty, right, get the heavy duty ones,
yep. Avoid using those cheap three to five dollars posts because they're going
to bend in half. We actually had a storm, I don't know three
or four years ago, and we had a couple of other plans and we
had those in there holding the fence. Those just snapped in half. I'll
never forget that. So when you factor in the cost, you know it's
not bad to pay that. Then the goat panels, as we said,
about sixteen foot long sections forty two inches high. You can use boltcutters to
cut them down. For a large tomatoes, we said eighteen in the small
twelve panels are right around forty eight to fifty dollars each. And where can
you find those goat pans? Same thing your local farm store, big box
store. Farm stores usually tend to be a little bit more reasonable with cost.
But here's the thing. You say, well, fifty yeah, but
you you know, you're making anywhere from on a sixteen foot panel, If
you're making twelves, you can make thirteen or fourteen up to you know ten.
Well, it comes out to you know, seven to eight nine dollars
a piece for those panels, and you put them with that seven dollars,
you're talking anywhere from twelve to fifteen dollars to make a tomato steak that's going
to last you ten years. That's way less expensive than mini options. Oh
yeah, and let's just go over the fact that they also hold your tomatoes
up way better. They're easy to work with, easy to put away.
We love them. I mean, all I can tell you is we've been
using them. When people come to the farm and they come to the test
gardens here at all our garden, they're like, what are those? How
do you make them? If you go to simplegardenlife dot com, we have
a complete article about this, including a video from our farm, from our
garden how we make them. Go to simplegardenlife dot com. Up in the
search bar. Just search tomato steak or best way to support it'll come up.
You'll see it right there, and it's a really good article. It'll
take you through it step by step, right and if you have any questions,
you can always email us at the farm at odwgarden dot com. That's
right, So I think that does it. You know what, We've got
a few weeks to go before we're ever going to be putting our tomato plants
in, but I can't wait. I can't wait either, and hopefully that
you guys try out this dioy system this year and love it as much as
we do. So Mary, I think it's that time. Remember whenever you
do, find the fun and gardening and grow something beautiful. So long,
everyone, happy gardening. We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Subscribe to the
Simple Garden podcast on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or most of your
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can listen and read all of the show notes to every episode, and if
you have any questions, any ideas for show topics, or if you want
to share your favorite garden tip, email us at the farm at owgarden dot
com until next time, Thanks everyone,