Tomato Pulleys

I am particularly fond of my tomato pulley system. I’ve never seen one like it in an urban setting like we are, and I’m so excited to share it with everyone. The idea hit me as I was watching a video, using an indoor greenhouse method. Where they were growing vertical using strings hanging from the rafters, instead of staking or caging the plants. They explained the method as being less strenuous on the plants stem, letting the weight fall, and using the string to hold the plant up but not damage the plant, or only give it a limited grow height. I was fascinated, and we had the perfect spot for it…. an old swing set frame! The swing set was here for years, as this is the house my fiance grew up in, so it was his childhood swing set. It was pretty busted up, and nothing held very well, it would sway from the weight of even a small toddler swinging, but it was not too unsafe to leave the structure itself standing. We deemed it the tomato garden, and got to work tilling. Because all of the original swing hooks were left in the cross beam, they were already measured evenly out for me, so I ordered some string pulleys from the FarmTek magazine, for $1.12 a piece, and I use the same exact ones to this day, never having to replace the string, or pulley itself.

Another interesting method I use for the tomatoes, and sometimes peppers, is cutting a hole in the bottom of the pots out, and burying the actual pot into the dirt 3/4 of the way deep. This is for multiple reasons, one being moisture, this is an excellent way to hold more moisture than if they were just in the ground, I would have to water far more often without the pots, and because I water by hand I have a close eye on the way everything grows and how much of what is needed where. For two, I have soil that is just full of clay and rocks, very tough to grow in comfortably, so this method allows me to add new soil each year for the plants to thrive in, and the bottoms are open so the roots can go far beyond the depth of the pot. This also keeps all the roots separate from anything else that gets planted here. For instance the grape vine on the outside of the plot has really long roots, and I don’t want to damage them when we pull the tomatoes. I also plant marigolds and basil in between the tomato rows, and the pots help to keep everything organized.

The string comes down from the pulley, and the end gets tied onto a clothes pin, you can use small stakes or garden hooks if you want, I use what I have, so clothes pins it is! The clothes pin gets pushed in to the soil right next to the tomato plant, it is important to do this early on as not to damage any roots when inserting into the soil, you want it fairly close to the plant, in the same spot where you’d stake it if you were. As the plant grows, you will wrap the string in a spiral fashion around the stem of the tomato. I also pull most of my suckers off, leaving one main stem for each plant, and I prune all of the spent leaves from the bottom up. You want to get rid of yellow and curled leaves and branches, they’ll just use up a percentage of the plants nutrients and you want all those benefits to go directly to producing the fruit of the plant. Our pulley frame is about 10 ft. or so tall, and our tomatoes easily go up and over the trellis at the top each year, which is an old box spring frame we put there to hold the grapes that climb. I’ve measured our tallest tomato plant at 15.5 ft! Not bad for such a small backyard garden!