Goddamn hallelujah it is tomato season! The seedlings I planted in May have exploded into thickets of green and red. When water from the sprinkler hits the leaves, the sweet, sharp smell of their insides blooms up. When I try to arrange one branch this way or another vine that way, the delicate green-white outer skin rubs off, leaving a seeping window into a deeper, interior green.
I don’t want those tears. You don’t either. But tomatoes are scraggly, lurching vines. Without some kind of support, they really would weave through and around themselves along the ground into thickets.
A case in point. Notice that I'm double-teaming with both a dippy cage and a craptastic bamboo stake. Notice that I've already tried to bundle the beast into some sort of manageable order. Notice how Nature laughs at me.
And tomato cages only do so much good. That is, if you’re giving your tomatoes the sun and the water they need, they will outgrow any cages I’ve ever seen at the hardware store. And stakes are a joke, which doesn’t mean I don’t have some from back in the day that I will continue to use until they’re splinters.
But you need to tie the limbs of your tomato plant up to support of some sort or another. If you don’t, you’ll end up breaking branches when you pick the fruit. The bounty is just too heavy for the source.
Rope or string will shred that outer green-white layer, however, at even the slightest of pressure. Panty hose is a good alternative. Just cut them up and tie them into loops in which your most adventurous branches can rest, the non-looped end tied to the tomato cage or stake.
Or, if you’re Jay, who doesn’t own or wear panty hose – or at least not since some collegiate party-down experiments in bank robber face-wear fashion (Stick ’em up punk, it’s the Fun Lovin Criminals!) – you can use the rag bag under the kitchen sink.
Two of today’s examples:
I am a boxer briefs man. These boxers were bought as an experiment at the 99¢ store. They fell apart in the first wash. You get what you pay for. Except in the case of Congress.
They always wear out first along my little toe.
A quick razor blade to these two numbers and…
...this new Brandywine is secured to the tomato cage, taking its ample weight off its branch, which was about to break,...
...and these...
...two explosions of tomato finally get separated out of that thicket in the first photo to be noticeably the two separate plants that they truly are.
These guys were so big, they were threatening to rip apart, the primary branches splitting, the whole of each plant collapsing into itself. If your tomatoes are getting what they need, they should be at this threshold of disaster by this late in August. And if you tie them up with rope or twine, you’ll only cut into them and kill your harvest.
So get those old socks, those T-shirts you accidentally bleached, the underwear that might be destined for use buffing wax into the car. DIY tomatoes. Rock.