Tomato Trellising

Since summer is just around the corner I'm shifting gears to gardening.  I quite like tomatoes and Mrs Bugbear shares my predilection.  In the summer we make a cherry or grape tomato salad that is a staple of our dinner table when the tomatoes in the garden are fresh and juicy.  This year have about eight cherry and grape tomato plants and this year's varieties were selected for high yields and flavor. 

A concomitant facet of high yielding cherry tomatoes is high climbing vines and to this end I had to construct a trellis for our cherry tomato plants.  We have about eight plants and I decided to take a page out of a vintner's manual to construct my trellis.  Once upon a time in wine country I observed a vineyard preparing a field for vines.  They used conventional steel fence posts and wire to give the vines something to climb on.  In the garden I constructed something more or less identical but out of much lighter duty materials.

Figure 1, The McBugbear Tomato Trellis.

Go to your local feed store and purchase three light-duty eight foot steel fence-posts (aka tee-posts) and a roll of galvanized steel electric fence wire.  Cut one post in half and install the two half posts and the two full posts as shown in Figure 1 at either end of a row of tomatoes. String a loop of wire from the top hole of the full length post to the bottom hole of the half post and then onto the the bottom hole of the full length  post.  Then string a wire from the top of one full- length post to the other and pull it as tight as possible using a pair of pliers.  String a wire every six to eight inches until you're eight to ten inches above the ground.  Weave the plants through the trellis as they grow or tie the plants to the wire as you would to a conventional trellis. 

Alternatively you can purchase some page-wire fence and install the full-length posts vertically.  It all depends on what you have on hand and how economically you want to construct the trellis.  I also am using this style of trellis to train my black raspberry canes.  The trellis for the black raspberry canes will be permanently installed so I used heavier duty fence posts and I will be applying a coat of Tremclad rust paint to the posts this fall.