The Tomato Tunnel
Tomato season is juuuuuust about here! In fact, I picked the very first tomato of the season just yesterday and promptly ate it. Farmers treat :-). This week I wanted to share a few photos of our tomato tunnel and talk about our pruning and trellising strategy both of which are very important to getting a good harvest of delicious, healthy, summery tomatoes.
We prune and trellis our tomatoes for a number of reasons that all help us with our goal of harvesting lots of large tomatoes from healthy plants for the duration of the season. Let’s talk about pruning first. When we prune tomatoes we’re pruning two things: lower leaves and “suckers.” We prune lower leaves from the plant to help improve airflow in our tunnel which helps reduce the risk of disease in our tomato tunnel. We prune suckers to both encourage the plant to produce larger tomatoes and to make the plants more manageable.
This years tunnel tomato crop. We’re very happy with the fruit set on these plants.
We’re trying the new-to-us QLIPR system for practicing the lower and lean tomato trellis system. The idea is that the growing season is long enough and that our tomato grow tall enough that we run out of vertical space in our tunnel. Because of this, we need a way to manage that height and lower the plants down and leaning them to one side or another allows us to easily manage that height.
QLIPR is unique in that it utilized two clips that leap frog each other on our weekly prune and trellis system. It also allows us to do all of our tomato management (pruning, leaning, harvesting) from the ground instead of a ladder.
Each plant gets a wire hook and two foam lined clips. The clips move along the vine as it grows allow us to keep the “business end” of the tomato at chest height. Clips can be seen on the far top right of this photo.
Tomato management has become one of my favorite things on the farm and tomatoes continue to be a very important crop on the farm. We hope to expand our tomato offerings in future years including growing some of our cherry tomatoes using this system as well as adding other heirloom tomatoes.