Garden Plants Support, to Stake or Not to Stake

How you handle wining crops, such as peas, pole beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, and melons depends on your attitude toward the garden as well as the space you have available. As you plan the layout of next year’s plot, choose a system that suits your gardening style.

Advantages of vertical growing:

• Fruit is cleaner and less susceptible to damage from rotting, insects, or slugs.
• More air and sunlight reach the plants, reducing likelihood of fungus or mildew infection.
• Cultivating and harvesting are easier.
• Less space is used.

• Yields are generally higher (unless you prune).

Disadvantages:

• More frequent watering is required. (Mulch to offset this.)
• More time is involved in preparing props for vertical growing. (But it may save time later.)
• Trained plants that are pruned (such as tomatoes) have reduced yields.
• Pruned tomatoes have more incidence of sunscald, cracking, and blossom-end rot.

Some gardeners can’t be bothered with vertical growing. “We don’t stake tomatoes, either the determinate [bushy] or the indeterminate [viney] varieties. Nor do we bother to mulch under them,” says Tom Foster, a gardener with a relaxed attitude and plenty of space. “We overplant. We have so many, so if we lose some, what difference does it make?”

“I don’t have the time, and don’t want to take the time, to stake,” says a golfer-gardener. “I let the tomatoes sprawl. In mid-July, when the soil is thoroughly warm, I put black plastic under them.”

Others feel that tiptoeing through tomato or cucumber vines, bending and stooping, searching for ripe ones, stepping on some in the process, and coping with slug holes, rabbit nibbles, and rot is not their idea of lazy gardening. They’d rather spend a little time in winter preparing supports and later enjoy their investment with a more organized garden. Supports should be ready to go into the garden at the same time as seeds or plants.

You don’t know the difference between determinate and indeterminate plants?

Most early tomatoes are of the determinate type, with short stems and fewer than three leaves on the vine between flower clusters. Determinate tomato plants grow naturally bushy and don’t need pruning. They tend to make their growth and then have all the fruit that is set ripen.

Late varieties are usually indeterminate. Their stems grow indefinitely, and the fruit ripens over a longer period. Indeterminate varieties respond well to pruning and vertical training.

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