 My name is Jack Wood. I am the co-founder of Growing Together. This will be our 16th year and also the Tomato Seed Saving Club and this will be our third year on that. So today we're going to talk about staking. We're going to talk about pruning and then we're also going to be talking about tying tomatoes. This is very fundamental in raising your tomatoes. A lot of people don't know the art of pruning but they should. So first we'll talk about staking. So at our gardens we use like a solid wood steak and you definitely want to have like 48 inches at the minimum and up to up to 60 inches and we we pound this in as far as we can go and like today like after we've had like these nice little rains we basically pound them down a little bit further because the tomato can actually pull the steak out of the ground. A lot of people use like what they call the wire basket. What happens with the wire basket is the tomatoes grow up. They grow over and pretty soon you have like 15 pounds of tomatoes pulling on the steak. The wind comes from the northwest, pushes it over and you have a mess. A lot of people use rebar and rebar is definitely more sturdy but what happens inside that rebar the plants get very dense and with the dense plants you're going to run into your disease problems. The other thing is you have a lot of stuff going on with side shoots. The plant becoming very dense. What you're going to have is a lot of tomatoes but not very many very many big tomatoes. So pruning is very important especially with the heirloom tomato. The tomato will basically continue to grow vertically up and it basically is like jack-in-the-bean stock. So the first the first pruning that we do is basically removing any leaves that touch the ground and you can see like these leaves are are touching the ground and they're starting to die off so we will we will prune them off and what will happen as the rains come the the rain washes up on the leaves and can cause a lot of your your different diseases on the plant. The second part of the pruning is is taking off the side shoots and the side shoots are basically anything growing between the the leaf and the stem and that that is a side shoot and ideally to remove them is when they're they're about this size as if you leave them on they basically become another stem of the plant and what happens is if you have too many side shoots and like like this one right here is like is a good example so this side shoot has grown has grown super big. There's a couple different things we could have done with this one instead of just cutting it off. We could have cut off the growing tip and this is what is actually called Missouri pruning and this will allow you can see like like on this actually has a tomato and if we did the Missouri pruning it would allow this tomato to produce. Also all of these leaves are providing photosynthesis for the plant which is helping to develop the fruit. One of the things you want to watch when you're pruning is like this is actually a blossom set and you don't want to prune that off because that's developed and that also develops along this stem but it does not occur between the the leaf branch and the in the leaf stem. Like here's another here's another side shoot that we will take off. The other thing that you want to do is between going from plant to plant as you go through each plant you want to have like some alcohol to dip your shears in so you're not transmitting a disease from one plant to the next plant. So basically the the reason for pruning is number one is to do so you have airflow through your plant and the other one is that you'll have fewer tomatoes on but there will be much better qualities larger and then also easier to pick so the tomato is a vine and if allowed to grow it will basically crawl along the ground. You can see basically this tomato here is basically sitting at a horizontal spot and is going to stay on the ground and that you do not want to leave your tomatoes like this because what will happen is number one they're intact with your tomato will be intact with the earth which could cause some problems also your your little rabbits and slugs will also will also eat them. So one of the things is the string is very important and what we use is um we use like Cisotwine so it's biodegradable and we use this twine to to mark our rows but then after we let it sit like on the row for like three weeks we take it off and it has become nice and soft. You can use nylon or you can go to your garden stores then they have these your fancy ties that they sell like 12 for three dollars um we prefer these at the end of the season you can take them off and reuse them and if you do compost them they'll basically they're biodegradable. So when when tying your tomato um you you never want to slam it up against the state you always want to to gently tie it and normally we wait we wait until like the the tomato has its first blossom because it's okay for that that tomato to be out in the wind getting stronger and stronger each day. So this is a a good example of a tomato that that needs to be pruned you can see it's laying on the ground it's also sending up side shoots because it definitely wants to grow operate so we will take that and and gently wrap it and normally like in a season your tomatoes will have like three to four ties um I will walk through like our we'll walk through this patch every Tuesday and Thursday and we will tie any tomato that needs to be tied and also looking for pruning that that needs to be done and just remember that you want it like any of the the leaves that are touching the ground should be removed. So last night we we got a pretty vicious rain and it did knock a few of our tomatoes down so one thing you notice like all of our stakes are upright because what we have done is after each rain we we push them down just a little bit further with the hammer and even if your tomato is looking like it's growing sideways a little bit once it gets the stake it'll it'll grow in an upright pattern. So now this is a good example of something that needs the Missouri pruning so what we will do is we will we will pinch that top part off so this vine will stop right there so the other thing that we're going to talk about today is the end of the season so what happens at the end of the season normally you have tons of green tomatoes and to prevent this from happening what you want to do it's called topping your plant so what you will do is like usually I do this like 30 days before the end of the season so like probably like on August 25th I will top all my plants and then I will remove all of the blossoms and basically then what will happen is all of your energy will be concentrated on the the tomatoes that are still on the vine so at the end of the season maybe on each tomato you'll have one or two green tomatoes which definitely are good for making salsa and and green apple pie but you don't want like a five gallon bucket full of green tomatoes. So the other thing we're going to talk a little bit about is now our tomato is fully developed and we have like 10 tomatoes they weigh a pound so we have 10 pounds that are pulling this tomato down so then what we're going to do it's called the hammock tie and so normally what we do there is we wrap wrap around the stake and then we'll tie under the arms or under like your leaf branches and what what that will do is we'll keep keep the tomato from sliding down the down the stake and so they'd all be crumpled up in a pile underneath so that will that will keep as it as the tomatoes grow it's going to keep it you know upright and not on the ground so we have another tie that called the figure eight tie and so you can see this tomato has two stands going up and what we normally what we do is we take the the string wrap it around in a in a figure eight pattern and then tie that up and what this allows is for like when the wind comes it's got some flexibility and then plus you're instead of using two pieces of twine you're only using one show you this is sort of a unusual tomato this is actually what they call a potato leaf and like a lot of the tomatoes like this is a this is a regular leaf and this is a potato leaf so basically the tomato originated in the Andes mountains and there's there's over 10 000 varieties of tomatoes and one of the things we do here so this is the tomato seed saving club and we we meet regularly twice twice a week we do Tuesdays two to four and then we do Thursdays from nine to eleven and we have like in this plot we have over a we have a hundred varieties that are that we plant four of each tomatoes and then we have 10 rows of of other varieties that probably like 45 more and we collect seeds like three times from each of the varieties and then once we've collected then they're shared with our members so it's sort of a good perk the other thing that you'll be able to do is you'll be able to get seeds from our seed collection right now we have 150 varieties at the end of this year we'll have 250