Friday, June 27, 2008
Training Vining Plants Up Strings...
This post is for FeralLiberal at CorrenteWire, and the host of commenters there who wanted to see how I train my vining plants up string trellises.
My comments to the Corrente thread:
Instead of cages, which get rusty, don’t compost, and sometimes make it difficult to harvest larger tomatoes, I do a little something different.
I bought some 1/2-inch electrical conduit, and 90-degree elbows and made a three-sided frame. I push it into the ground along any of my vining plants.
About 6-inches above the ground, I tie some stout jute twine parallel to the ground, from that line, I run twine from that string to the top bar of the frame. It is up this line that I twist and train the vining plants. When the harvest is over, and the plants are spent, I can snip the natural fiber line, and compost it with the plants. This is also great for when you’ve still got a load of green tomatoes, but first frost is nigh.
Simply snip the top of the line, and gently lay the plants down on the ground, and make a little tunnel with some plastic sheeting over them. It protects the plants, and the extra heat in the poly tunnel speeds ripening.
For those with limited gardening or storage space, this is a GREAT way to go.
The method is so strong that I grow cantaloupes up those strings. With a particularly heavy melon,I sometimes will make a cradle for the fruit out of some cheesecloth, as the melon ripens and starts getting a bit soft. the whole scheme has stood up to severe windstorms.
Best yet— you can grow more veggies in a smaller space, and your food isn’t all dirty and potentially rotted from ground contact… and it is extremely easy to harvest, as it is hanging right in front of you, with no vines to wade through.
Cheers!
Here are the pictures (click for much larger view):
Here's Mountain Girl posing before one of the garden beds. To the right are Salad Cucumbers climbing up strings. To the left are Cantaloupes.
I gently twist the plant top new growth around the twine.
Then I VERY gently help the whatever that thing is that grabs and twists around things, around the twine above the foliage.
These Big Boy and Yellow Pear Tomatoes are 5'-6" tall.
There are two Pickling Cukes ready for picking in the middle of this picture.
Here's a little one with the blossom still attached. The point is that the fruit is easy to see, easy to harvest, not lying in the dirt, and not getting bug-eaten.BTW-- the European Honey Bees are FINALLY visiting the garden in droves. I was out this morning, picking strawberries off of one side of a plant, while two bees were pollinating on the other. No worry of being stung. They are very gentle, and seem blissfully happy to have found the yard. They are busy on the veggies, and all the clover blooming in the yard. I'll try to snap a pic our two tomorrow morning, as they tend to go to hive by the time I get home. As you can tell, I am extremely happy to see them.
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Labels: Gardening, Vertical Gardening
