We used to grow a lot of tomatoes. Now we only plant about 1,200-1,400 because we do most of them in the high tunnels. But with my traveling we still didn’t have a lot of time to tie them up. We were using the basket weave technique with 3/4” metal electrical conduit every 10 feet or so. This year we tried something new:

We hammered two 10-foot long “T-Stake” metal poles in the ground (I know that’s excessively long, but we had them lying around and anyway I am always optimistic about how tall our tomatoes are going to get). We also tried this with wooden posts and it worked great, too. We put one on each end of a 100-foot long tomato bed and we’ve also tried this on one of our 300’ hoophouses and it worked there, too.

We bought 17-gauge electric fence wire and a “ratcheting fence strainer” (They were about $2.50 each). We planted the tomatoes and let them grow. Every 12-18 inches we wrap a loop of the fencing wire from the eastern Post… along one side of the tomatoes… to the western post… back to the eastern post (up the other side of the tomatoes). The tomatoes are then “caught” in between the wire!
We let them grow up another 12-18 inches and do it again! There is minimal “tucking” we have to do for some stragglers. Some rows didn’t need any.

We noticed that as the tomatoes got bigger, the wire started to sag (we couldn’t pull it VERY tight because it was just 17 gauge). So we hammered two 3/4 inch pieces of electrical conduit into the ground (so one every 33 feet… but it seems fine at 40 feet, too) between the east and west posts and we wired our electrical fencing wire to those poles to keep them up high and un-sagged.

We also noticed that the eastern and western posts started to quickly bend inwards – so we braced those. Basically I just tied a wire to the top and then down to a stake I hammered in the ground.
It’s absolutely the fastest I’ve ever been able to tie tomatoes in and I THINK we’ll be able to reuse the fencing wire again if I get something called a “jenny” to wind it up for the winter.

I guess this is a little premature and I should write to you after the season is over but it’s really saving us a lot of time and I’m excited about it. We have some rows left with the basketweave but it’s just so depressing to use it. Not only is it a time-saver in the moment, we save on posts (And time hammering the posts) and we’ll save on cleanup (no pulling out string and no pulling a zillion stakes out of the ground).

Ron Khosla
Huguenot Street Farm
New Paltz, NY