Twine-ing For You

One of the most important tools that you can bring to your garden is cotton twine. It’s inexpensive, has countless uses, and compostable at the end of the season.

Whether you’re ground or container gardening, supporting or opening up air flow, these are a few reasons why you can start using twine today.

Opening Up

Before this past winter, I really pruned back my raspberries. Part of my problem last year is that I didn’t know my new cane from old cane. So I made my best guess. I also thinned it out to a couple of canes in a patch to encourage more fruit growth.

You can imagine my surprise when this spring rolled around and nothing but leaves were growing. Especially since last year my raspberry patch produced so many blossoms that it was one of the first things that the local bees had for food.

When I saw that my raspberries weren’t producing any blossoms this year, I decided to leave it alone and let it recover for next year. And here you can see how my canes just fell on each other.

What I didn’t count on was that my raspberries would produce blossoms and fruit in August!

Normally in my grow zone, the flowers and berries set in the spring. And while this year we did have a spring season (unlike last year), our summer has been completely cool (about 3 months behind in actual summer heat). It was this past week that I walked past my raspberries and saw blossoms and fruit just starting to form.

With my current growing season lacking pollinators, I needed to open these canes up and present the blossoms so the two bees that I saw in this patch of my garden (that were working while I was tending to the canes) could find the blossoms easier and crawl through a maze of leaves.

The canes that were compatible with hooping together, I used my twine to together. With the tail that you see here, I attached it to the cyclone fence you see in the back, to prevent the hoop from falling forward when fruit sets.

In the center, I had 6-8′ canes that I arched back toward the fence. The cane on the right was lying on the ground, so I stretched it upward to present the blossoms.

I know it’s kind of hard to see in this picture that there were three dimensional loops that I made forward/backward and side to side. So while this picture looks like there are two upright clumps of canes, in actuality it’s more like the canes are arching around each other.

This makes it easy for me to spot and harvest the berries. But more importantly my pollinators can find them easier and be efficient with their flight patterns.

TIP: For those of you who are limited on space, you can grow raspberries in a small area. The space that I use is about 1.5 feet deep and about 5 feet wide. The trick is to keep on top of your cane maintenance. Thin when you need to. And to prevent the cane from volunteer grow outside your space, cut back the new cane as they emerge.

The added benefit of opening up your canes like this is that it’s easier to cut out the old growth cane that you missed last season (brown cane with no leaves or fruit).

As opposed to the canes having collapsed on themselves, you can see here how the buds and fruit are much more accessible to the pollinators and myself. And with the heavier bearing canes anchored to the fence, the cane is not going to be stressed under the fruit load.

This is not the traditional way of growing raspberry canes, as far as providing structure goes. But I wanted to share what has worked many seasons for me because sometimes we have to think outside of the box to work with the space that we’re given. And if you have cyclone fencing, you have a grow structure that doesn’t cost you anything additional for your gardening overhead.

Support for Tall/Long Vines

One of the choices that we made this year was to increase our tomato count in our gardening plan. One reason is that it’s one of our largest consumed crops and a base product for many of the meals we eat through the year. Another reason is that I wanted to try a handful of new variety of tomatoes that our outside our standard never fail varieties (which of course I had to keep growing this year).

While I have a decent size collection of tomato cages, I had maybe enough for half of all the tomatoes I wanted to put into the ground. That and I love indeterminate tomatoes. The problem I have every year is that my tomatoes always grow too tall for my cages. So this year I decided to line grow them.

This is now my preferred method for growing tomatoes! I can walk through the rows to collect tomatoes, which I never could do with cages. Line growing tomatoes are also the way to go when you want to grow many vines with a smaller foot print. Mine are about a foot apart. A few plants I missed a couple of suckers, but with additional lines, I was able to train and direct them in a growth direction that keeps the airflow between the plants.

TIP: It’s important to remember that when growing tomatoes densely like this to remove the suckers. This keeps the airflow between the plants, which decreases the chance of disease.

Another added benefit with line growing tomatoes is that there were a handful of plants that were stunted by the cool summer and were over shadowed by the faster growing plants (not just different varieties, but the same varieties that did better taking off). When I adjusted the lines, it opened up pockets in between the plants where I could get the sunlight down on the stunted ones. And they took off and have caught up to the ones that started quicker.

All of this was finesse and control that I never had while cage growing.

If you haven’t line grown tomatoes before, you want to have a structure that you secure you line from. With the bottom of your line, you attach it to the bottom of your start (or even under the roots when you transplant) and through the season, you wrap the line around the vine.

TIP: focus on supporting the main stem under each of the armpits. This keeps the weight of larger bearing fruit (like beefsteak) from stressing out the main stem. This is the first year where I haven’t had to deal with damaged branches from heavy fruit. And my beefsteaks are hanging in the air of fully upright vines of very happy tomatoes.

In fact, this year not all of our tomatoes fit under our trellising structure (a gift from a buy nothing group–so another area where we improved our garden without having to save or budget for it). So I used a few cages. Unfortunately my tomatoes tag teamed with my beans and started to take down my corn. (This is a subject for another day.) Fortunately, I had the cages just outside the structure. When I unweave the tomato vines from the beans and corn, I line tied them to the outside of the structure. This relieved the stress on my corn and gave the structure that the tomato vines were yearning for.

You can see in the right picture, my husband threaded a 10′ piece of conduit through the top section of our structure, out and over the caged tomatoes. So rest assured that if your structure is smaller than your need it can be modified with other materials to extend your grow radius.

If you don’t have conduit already, don’t feel like you have to go out and purchase it if you’re on a tight budget. A long branch (from a trimming company of found fallen while on a hike), cleaned from smaller branches and limbs. Just make sure to secure this addition with some cordage. (As we were using conduit, a healthy length of twine was more than enough to secure it to our structure.)

Structure for Potted Plants

A major reason why I hear people say that they don’t grow vegetables themselves is because they don’t “have land” where they can grow. Whether you’re living in a city, renting from a landlord who says you can’t have a garden, or any other legitimate reason why you can’t have a garden… know that you can still have the option of growing some produce in a container garden!

In the picture on the left, I have two pepper plants and two tomato plants. In this space, I don’t have room for cages. And an upright bamboo support was not enough because the size of my plants and physics were just causing my pots to fall over.

To solve this problem I pulled out one of my 6′ shepherd’s hooks, anchored it in the center of all the pots, and ran lines to each plant. Depending on where you live, any number of other resources can be used in the same manner. If you’re patio has an over head beam, a large command hook can be used. If you only have two pillars, run line at a certain height between the pillars (two or three times around). From this line, tie to your line what you are running down to your potted plants. Again, take a look at the resources that you have and use your imagination to make the structure that your plants need.

The picture on the right is my pepper plant that really took off with four large branches. When the blossoms started presenting on this plant, I knew I had to open it up or I would decrease the amount of pollination because of hidden blossoms. So I spread out the four branches in four different directions; two to the shepherd’s hook, one to the fence, and one to my uncovered greenhouse.

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There’s no one way that you have to offer support to your garden! Be creative. Think outside the box.

You are capable of growing the amount of food you want to grow.

Look at your plants and see what it is that they need. If they need more air, create a system to open them up and give them more air. If you need to maximize the rate of blossom pollination, look for ways that you can make it easier for your pollinators to find and get to your blossoms (as well as making sure that the fruit doesn’t crowd each other out of space).

If your budget is tight, or you need your money to go to other things, look around you and see what resources you have that are free or at a less expensive cost than some of the other conventional gardening items. For example, if you want to grow lots of tomatoes but can’t afford the cages you need, go with cotton twine. It’s very inexpensive and is just as effective.

What other tricks do you have for supporting your garden on a budget?