Tying Up Tomatoes PT2

Everything in the raised beds are growing nicely praise God.  I thought I would show everyone the progression of what it looks like when you tie up your Tomato plants as the growing season progresses.  How the wrapping around of the hemp twine looks as the plant grows.  I use hemp twine because it is study at the beginning of the growing season.  Is soft and gentle on the plants and very easy to wrap around the plants as they grow.  By the end of the growing season it has stared to biodegrade and you can literally pull it down with out cutting it when I am stripping out my garden beds.  I just toss it on the composting pile with the rest of the plant.  I don't have to work to separate it and throw it away. 

When I did my last post about this, here, I showed how we used T-post to hold up a pole and then plant the tomatoes directly under the pole.

Then how I tied the hemp twine over the pole and a little loose loop around the bottom of the plant.  I started wrapping the twine around the plants but in that post the plants were still so short I only got one or two good wrap arounds.

Well over the last few weeks every day or so I go out into my garden and as the plant grows tall enough to wrap the twine around again I do so.  I also pinch off any sucker in the branches at that time.  The plants have grown very tall now so I have wrapped the twine around many times now.  As you can see.

Doing this gives total support to the main "trunk" of the plant.  If I have a plant that has two main trunks I drop another line down from the pole above and start the wrapping process on that as well.  Or if any branches start to get to heavy.  Same thing.  I drop a line down from above to give support. 

The rest of the pictures I am posting today are just the progress of some of the rest of my raised beds and how they look now that we are a few weeks into the growing season.

Tomato plant on the left (had extra and had a space there.  Put it in a cage next to a little fence to tie it to for any extra support.  In the front of this bed is squash and training up the back trellising is cucumbers.

Pepper plants. I plant garlic or onion all over in all my beds where ever there is a space as we always use so much through out the year.  It is also said to keep away some pests.

Asparagus bed over looking squash.

The front small raised bed is an herb garden.  If you look all the way to the back raised beds you can see spinach and beets.  Usually spinach is done by now but it has been unusually cool for this time of year and it was still growing and had not bolted yet.  I took these pictures a week ago.  I actually finally pulled it all out now and we are working on eating it!  As I had planted pepper plants amongst it thinking I would have harvested it all before now and it was stunting the growth of my pepper plants.

My potting bench with some succulents on it.  Over grown mint to the left.

My little gardeners in training.  They are out there weeding.  I was walking up into the house after milking the goats and could not help myself from taking this picture.    I built Zeke and Carolyn each an 8x4 raised garden bed several years ago side by side.  They are allowed to grow anything they want in it.  They keep it all up themselves from weeding to watering.  Carolyn chose mostly flowers this year.  I was surprised.  Of course boys like to eat so his is all food.

I pray your growing season and life is going well.  Blessings and happy farming!
susan