How to Grow Your Own Tomatoes, Part 3: Staking, Training and Pruning
Tomato beds have an unfair reputation as the messiest, ugliest, most disease-ridden parts of a vegetable garden. To keep them from devolving to this sorry state, tomato plants need your care and support. More specifically, they need the support of a trellis, stake or cage, and they need you to train them to grow on it while primping and pruning their vines into a respectable form. If you do, the plants will be healthier and more productive—and more presentable when you’re showing off your garden to visitors.
Support Structures
Before you get started, you need to know whether you have neat and compact determinate tomato plants or one of the more unruly indeterminate varieties. The former group consists of varieties that have been bred for stems that grow only to a specific length; many of the modern...