End-of-season edit: When all is said and done, I won’t be doing the sprawl method again with full-sized tomatoes. Maybe I planted these too closely, but I ended up with a tangled mass of vines, weighted down by the fruit. A lot of tomatoes ended up rotting. Either you can’t see them, or you can’t get to them, or they end up on the ground. It’s a lot less effort to grow them, compared to staking them up, but you don’t get much in the end.
Everything else here: Cold-tolerant tomatoes, and electric fence as deer deterrent, gets two thumbs up. I now plan on growing cold-tolerant (short-season) tomatoes every year.
I’m now in Phase III of my four-part tomato strategy for 2022. I outlined that in my first garden post of 2022 (G22-001). It’s time for an update. I’m posting it because otherwise I’ll never be able to recall how things went this season.
Phase I: Cold-tolerant tomatoes: Doing fine.
Phase I of my tomato strategy was to put in some cold-tolerant short-season tomato plants. If you’ve ever planted Early Girl tomatoes, these are all variations on that theme. You get small tomatoes (maybe tennis-ball sized) on small plants. The plants can be set out when temperatures are above freezing, but still too cool for mainstream tomato varieties. Then they hustle up and produce tomatoes well before other varieties are even flowering.
This year I planted three each of Fourth of July (49 days), Glacier (55 days), and Siletz (75 days), where the day counts are days to maturity after first being set out in the garden. All three are flowering, and Fourth of July has already begun setting fruit. If all continues on track, I’ll have tomatoes from Fourth of July before the Fourth of July.
Finally, because these are small, I haven’t staked them. I’m just growing them in tomato cages, with the hope that this will provide adequate support for plants that, in theory, won’t get much over 4′ tall.
Phase II: Paste tomatoes: Hubris and a rage purchase.
Phase II of my tomato strategy was to plant a lot of paste tomatoes. I have big plans for making sun-dried tomatoes (see Post G22-015 for solar dryer plans). In hindsight, maybe my paste-tomato excesses angered the tomato gods, as nothing about Phase II seems to be working out.
I put 20 or so plants in along my back lot line, under the theory that deer don’t eat tomatoes. The idea being that they’d be safe, even if they were out of range of my Yard Defender motion-activated sprinkler and other deer-deterrent devices. To keep the effort down, I used woven plastic cloth to suppress weeds, rather than a more normal mulch (straw, grass clippings, and so on). The results was a tidy, orderly bed of well-spaced tomato seedlings.
The deer more-or-less immediately mowed those down. The survivors are currently in rehab, with a few of the larger stubs now re-sprouting leaves. I also notice a hitherto-unknown leaf disease on one of these varieties, which, given that I only set them out about a week ago, has to be some sort of local record.
In any case, I’ve started another batch of paste tomato seedlings to make up for the deer losses. And the likely disease losses.
Post-deerpocalypse, I rage-purchased a portable electric fence from my local Tractor Supply store. I’m not proud of it, but there it is, in the picture above.
I didn’t start out looking for an electric fence. But I couldn’t help noticing how changes in technology have made these cheap and quick to install. Instead of wire, there’s a conductive twine made of interwoven plastic and metal fibers. Instead of metal stakes with standoffs, there are push-in plastic stakes with loops through which to feed the conductive twine. The box to energize the fence is waterproof. The only hard part is driving a grounding rod into the soil. (For a single-wire electric fence, the ground is literally the system ground. It’s the return path for the electricity. If you wish you can set up a two-wire fence (one hot wire, one ground wire) that saves you the effort of pounding in a grounding rod.) All said and done, it took me about 20 minutes to set up the electric fence pictured above.
So far, the deer haven’t been back, but that could be a matter of luck.
And yeah, I grabbed it to see how nasty the shock is. It would keep me away, and that’s a fact.
Normally, the deer just learn to jump over these, but in my case, the patch being defended is only 4′ wide. So this may be enough to keep them off. We’ll see.
Phase III: Heirloom, extra-tasty tomatoes: Trying out the sprawl method.
I love it when somebody makes up a technical-sounding name for the act of doing nothing.
When I stumbled across the term “sprawl method”, (on Tomatoville, no less), I instantly added it to my gardening lexicon. No longer will I have to say that I was just too lazy to stake up my tomatoes. Instead, this year I’m “experimenting with the sprawl method”. I just have to practice saying that with a straight face.
In case you haven’t guessed, the gist of the sprawl method is to let your tomatoes sprawl. Well, actually, that’s not the gist, that’s it, period. No stakes, no cages, no pruning, no nothing. Just a bunch of tomato vines, doin’ what comes natur’ly.
Cynics may note that “too lazy” and “sprawl method” yield the same end result. But it’s all about the intention. “Too lazy” implies that I’m omitting something, while “sprawl method” suggests that I let my tomatoes flop over as part of some overall strategy. The sprawl method is being purposefully lazy. That’s a huge difference. It’s like the difference between lying, and merely being mistaken about something.
Switching to the sprawl method is something of a gamble. Last year I had my best tomato year ever. Plausibly, that was because I invested heavily in mulching/staking/pruning my tomato plants. The theory is that by pruning to a single leader, and keeping the plants up away from the soil, the plants will be more nearly disease-free and will produce larger tomatoes.
That said, an approach of staking and pruning tomatoes requires frequent attention. It’s not a one-and-done, it’s more of a season-long process. By the middle of the season, you have to inspect and correct your tomatoes every few days or they get out of hand. For a dozen plants, it’s not too big a deal. For the roughly fifty or so I’m hoping to grow this year, that starts to be some effort. I think the high labor input is why a lot of open-field tomato farming is done with the sprawl method.
Whether or not the sprawl method works well seems to depend on three things:
- What variety you plant (determinate tomato varieties work better than indeterminate),
- Your local climate (dry climates are better suited than humid).
- What you spray to combat tomato leaf diseases (frequent spraying with commercial anti-fungals works best).
For sure, I’ll be giving this an acid test. I’ll be growing three varieties of indeterminate heirloom tomatoes in the hot-and-humid Virginia summer. And there is zero chance that I’m going to spray fungicides on my tomatoes. My sole concession to this new approach is that I’m mulching the bed heavily in the hopes of minimizing soil splash when it rains, and I’m putting in irrigation to avoid soil splash when I water the plants.
So, we’ll see.
At any rate, I now have a dozen heirloom tomato plants in one of my raised beds. I’m trying Aunt Ruby’s Green German, Chocolate Stripes, and Cherokee Purple, all of which have a reputation for being extra-tasty.
Conclusion
The dozen heirloom tomatoes planted today follow the nine cold-tolerant plants that are currently setting fruit, and the now-somewhat-less-than-20 paste tomatoes clinging to life inside a portable electric fence, along with a few equally-harassed pepper plants. (Because, as everybody knows, deer won’t eat pepper plants either, right?)
Finally, this week I’ll start the seeds for Phase IV of my 2022 tomato strategy. That consists of about a dozen heat-tolerant tomato plants. (Varieties Floridade and Arkansas Traveler, solely because those were the heat-tolerant varieties I could buy from local sources.) The idea is that they’ll be setting and ripening fruit in the heat of August, when all the other varieties will likely take a break due to high daytime temperatures.
That’s the plan, anyway.
Edit, August 2024: I note that Floridade (sometimes spelled Floradade) grew and set fruit just fine, despite being planted late. So, as a heat-tolerant full-sized tomato, they got the job done. They did in fact give me a decent yield of perfect-looking tomatoes. The only problem is that my vine-ripened Floridades tasted just like the mealy cardboard-y grocery-store tomatoes of my youth. I even planted some in 2023, to make sure it wasn’t just the growing conditions. Same result. I tossed out the rest of the seed packet, as I won’t be growing those again.
Instead, I now know (and have observed) that cherry tomatoes typically don’t suffer the heat-related lack of fruit set (“blossom drop”) that plagues most full-sized tomatoes. See Post G24-021. So instead of seeking out some “heat tolerant” tomatoes, I’m just growing a few generic red cherry tomatoes, to smooth over what would otherwise be a late-summer gap in ripe tomato production.
