The Florida Weave for tomatoes

[HotPepperQueen]

With 90 tomato plants this year, I needed an inexpensive way to get them up off the ground. After some research I found the Florida Weave. It has worked really great so far- we will see what happens when the plants have fruit on them. What method do you use?

 

[journey11]

I've always tied mine to individual stakes. You end up paying almost a dollar per stake though. I have 52 tomatoes this year.

I'd like to come up with a reusable and/or more economic solution. Most of the stakes end up as kindling at the end of the season. I reused about half of last year's stakes that were still straight. I know early blight won't carry over on them, which I did have that last year. I just hope nothing else could have. So far so good.

I've seen the Florida weave at the tomato u-picks across the river. Seemed to work very well for them, but their tomatoes weren't as tall as mine. Maybe they have determinates or just a trait their hybrids had. I wasn't confident enough to try it myself since I have so many different kinds (and I didn't know what it was called to look it up.) Be sure to let us know how it works out. If all goes well, I'll give it a try next year too. Looks much quicker and easier, that's for sure!

Do you sucker prune your tomatoes or train them to one or two main vines with this method? Or is it left up to personal preference? I always like to prune and train mine, going for larger 'maters in the end. I was working on my DD7's Romas the other day and half way through wondered if maybe those paste tomatoes would be better off unpruned. I left half of them alone as an experiment. I bet they'd do well with the Florida weave. They are short and stocky too.

 

[digitS']

I can't do much more than express my frustration.

The tomato patch must have had nearly 20 plants when I was still using circles of fencing. I still had to stake but the real problem was what to do with all those tubes of wire during the off-season.

I'm not sure if the larger tomato cages were commonly available during those years. They stack well but I bet I'd still feel a stake would be necessary. I've used as many as 3 stakes with the smaller cages.

Old hay as mulch in the potatoes and a plague of voles as a result, destroyed any interest I had in using deep mulch anywhere in the garden. I've had problems with voles in the tomatoes even without the mulch.

One problem is my garden layout. I have 4' wide beds. Seems to me that single rows should not take up so much space and I tend to step into the beds trying to see and harvest all the fruit. The one time I tried the Florida weave, I used 2 rows in the beds. Don't do that! With the plants, stakes and strings only 2' apart, I had a terrible mess of vines!

Single stakes have worked best but tying up, tying up, tying up, etc. takes so much time! The plants still, probably, need the entire 4' bed for adequate sunlight. It would place each row of plants 6' apart. I should stop resisting that and go with individual stakes or try @HotPepperQueen 's Florida weave again!

Steve

 

[Lavender2]

That is interesting. You could add another support line wherever it's needed.
I use 1x2x8' stakes and the tall cages. The stakes are at least a foot in the ground and I have been able to reuse them for several years. The main stems are tied to the stake and some of the laterals are tied to the cage if they need support. I still end up with a jungle, and sometimes have to add additional stakes for long branches with heavy tomatoes. But it works for the most part. Not real cheap, but reusable. I usually only plant 30-40.

@digitS' , the cages WILL tip over if they are not staked also, and they usually are not tall enough.

Photo from last year.

The only other method I have tried is training them to a fence. That was a disaster, but I didn't have the time to keep up on the training, pruning and tieing. This year I'm using the velcro tie stuff, quicker and easy to remove.

 

[Ridgerunner]

My normal drop and drag method of uploading photos has gone bonkers. I guess some browser, operating system or something has been "improved" to make the world better so we need to keep learning new techniques. As you may be able to tell, I get frustrated with this type of thing occasionally, especially on just one cup of coffee. Hopefully it is just a glitch. I did manage to get one to upload in a way that I can add text. I just can't add other photos for details.

This is from last year. Instead of those wooden stakes I'm using metal T-posts this year. In my silty loam soil they are not that hard to drive and not that hard to take back out at the end of the season. And they don't rot. In rocky soil they may become more permanent. Something to consider Steve.

I cut the bottom horizontal off a cow panel so I have "spikes" to push into the ground. I also cut them into roughly 8' lengths instead of leaving them the full 16' so they are easier to handle. Since one of those verticals is at exactly 8', I wind up with half about 7-1/2' long and half 8-1/2' long. The open space is about 24" wide, 12" on each side of the tomato plant.

I push the points into the ground then wire the panels to the stakes. I extend the panels maybe 12" to 18" past the end tomato in the row. If the exact row length doesn't work out (and it won't) I leave a little gap between the panels where they meet. This gives me a cage just under 4' high. Not high enough. So I take a second 8' length of cow panel and wire that to the top of the other, overlapping maybe 18" to 24". The stiffness of the cow panel will hold it up right. So now my cage is about 6' high.

To stiffen the top, I take 24" pieces of ripped 2x4's so I have 2x2's and wire those across the top to hold it open and keep it closed.

I prune back to two leaders, one on each side, and tie or weave the tomatoes to the sides of the cage. I normally have to tie the leaders to the side to get them in position but if I stay on top of it I can normally weave them through the openings in the panel after that. I don't always stay on top of it.

The plants are about 24" apart in the row. I try to keep them pruned off maybe 18" high, mainly to open the bottom up to a little air flow, and mulch of course. I only grow indeterminants so pruning doesn't hurt, I hope. Some of my varieties may not reach the top of the cage but some will overflow the top and reach all the way back to the ground.

I normally leave 5-1/2 feet between the row of tomatoes and the next row over. Usually I have peppers, eggplant, maybe okra in one of the neighboring rows, things that don't spread a whole lot, while the row on the other side is maybe green peas, onions, maybe garlic, a spring crop that comes out before too late in the summer. That 5-1/2 feet gets mulched too. Really keeps the weeds and grass down.

The flat cow panels store really well. I used to just lean them against my garden fence. The problem with that is grass and weeds grow up in them in the spring so I have a mess to clean up when I finally use the panels. Now I carry them to a shed where I lean them against a wall. That's another reason to make them 8' long instead of leaving them 16', carrying them plus shed length. The T-posts or stakes are just piled up.

 

[JimWWhite]

With 90 tomato plants this year, I needed an inexpensive way to get them up off the ground. After some research I found the Florida Weave. It has worked really great so far- we will see what happens when the plants have fruit on them. What method do you use?

Now this is a cool idea. I have ten 2'x2' boxes that I've planted my tomatoes in for the past few years. I have four metal fence posts where I run three strands of plastic coated clothes line from post to post separated by about a foot vertically between each line. I've been fastening the vines using cinch ties. If I change it to run two sets of two lines at about 1-1/2 feet up and another pair at 2-1/2 feet up and cross them at each post I can have the same thing without possibly damaging the vines. Thanks for the idea!

 

[HotPepperQueen]

I've always tied mine to individual stakes. You end up paying almost a dollar per stake though. I have 52 tomatoes this year.

I'd like to come up with a reusable and/or more economic solution. Most of the stakes end up as kindling at the end of the season. I reused about half of last year's stakes that were still straight. I know early blight won't carry over on them, which I did have that last year. I just hope nothing else could have. So far so good.

I've seen the Florida weave at the tomato u-picks across the river. Seemed to work very well for them, but their tomatoes weren't as tall as mine. Maybe they have determinates or just a trait their hybrids had. I wasn't confident enough to try it myself since I have so many different kinds (and I didn't know what it was called to look it up.) Be sure to let us know how it works out. If all goes well, I'll give it a try next year too. Looks much quicker and easier, that's for sure!

Do you sucker prune your tomatoes or train them to one or two main vines with this method? Or is it left up to personal preference? I always like to prune and train mine, going for larger 'maters in the end. I was working on my DD7's Romas the other day and half way through wondered if maybe those paste tomatoes would be better off unpruned. I left half of them alone as an experiment. I bet they'd do well with the Florida weave. They are short and stocky too.

I tend to lightly prune my romas, heavily prune my heirlooms, and occasionally prune my hybrids at the base. It depends on how the plant looks. They stay up better with more suckers at the twine so its not rubbing on a fruit bearing branch. It's really about preference. YouTube has a ton of videos on there demonstrating how to do the Florida Weave.

 

[HotPepperQueen]

I got all 18 six foot t-posts from my grandpas barn for free and they were actually in really good shape. They were from his old calf pen that stood from the early 50s to late 70s. I have also gotten 4 steel chicken feeders and a metal chicken waterer from him that are my favorite to use with my flock. They don't make anything as durable anymore.

There are also 24 six foot tall bamboo posts that I paid $31 for on Amazon. I used baling twine to string them up and that was about $30 for 3,000 feet.

 

[thistlebloom]

I am a Florida weave failure. I tried it last year, but it turned into a mess after the plants got about 3 feet tall. Partly because I had a lot different varieties of tomatoes with different habits of growth, and partly because I just wasn't diligent enough to keep up with it.
But I think yours look great Anna, and you seem like a more disciplined tomato grower than I have become. Yours will be what makes the Florida weave such an attractive staking option.

 

[dickiebird]

I have used the Florida weave but it can be labor intensive. I used metal T posts and bailing twine.
Next I used crutches, the alum ones work best, but I never really came up with enough to do all I plant.
I do a lot of 5 gal. buckets on my deck and in the green house so my crutches found a use there.
In the garden I'm using the Dickiebird sprawl, just let 'em go where ever they see fit.

THANX RICH