Strung Out

Today we began phase two of our tomato trellis project. This involved training the tomatoes up pieces of string so that they grow nice and tall and also look cool. As an added bonus, these tomatoes will not make you puke your guts out, though that has less to do with our trellis than it does with the fact that we don't water our garden with sewerage.

Anyway, to get our trellis in working order we first cut pieces of string slightly longer than the height of the trellis and tied little loops at one end. Then, we threw them up and over the top bar of the trellis so we could make a good, tight slipknot.

Here's Kelly throwing the string into place. He was making a weird face in the photo so I cropped that out and left his disembodied hand.


Here's the resulting trusty slipknot.


When the strings were hung above each tomato plant, we tied the end of the string loosely around the stem of each plant and twisted it up a bit, so the tomatoes were supported by the string.


I was too busy playing with string to take many illustrative photos, but if you'd like some more detail about this method of supporting tomatoes I highly recommend this entertaining video from Hanna of This Garden Is Illegal.