A Couple of Trellising Questions

I have a couple of determinant tomato plants (Celebrity and Sweet 100) in my kitchen door garden.  A typical newbie mistake I made was to put them each in a single square.  Now, 6 weeks later, they are getting pretty much tangled together.  I did the 'bury the stem' step and the Sweet 100 never really straightened up.  Yesterday I installed some plastic electrical conduit on the bed and did some stringing to get the plants mostly upright and as separate as possible, but I'm not happy with my trellising. FWIW, I think I'm going to replace the plastic conduit with 1/2" metal conduit because the plastic is too flexible and easily distorted while stringing.

I thought I understood what Florida weave was, but now I'm not so sure. I didn't attempt a weave on this stringing but will do so when I learn how. 




You can see that I made loops to hold up some of the stems.  I want to correct and overcome this because I'm afraid that additional growth might not play well with these loops.  Can someone please educate me or point me to a wiki or video on the Florida weave or suggest another method I should try?

Also, I did my stringing with cotton kitchen twine, the kind used to tie up meat for roasting or baking.  I have some nylon twine that might be better suited.  Is nylon ok or is there a chance I might damage the plants (with a Florida weave or other stringing)?

Some more pics:


Above you can see that the Celebrity is shading out the chives (to the left).




Above you can see the thyme and lemon thyme in the foreground and the chives and some radishes I planted in the square in the background.  Those radishes should be ready to harvest this coming week.




Above you can see the 3 squares in the background containing chives and white radishes (left), Celebrity and white radishes (center) and the Sweet 10 plant (right).  In the foreground are the 2 thyme plants(left) , carrots (center) and there are more carrots of a different variety at right which did not sprout and grow as well as the ones in the middle.

All suggestions greatly appreciated and gratefully received.

rh

I like your garden.  Pretty and green.

I plant determinates quite a bit but don't get as much growth as you do in Texas.  I use either a tomato cage or a stake for deters, most of which I put in containers.  They don't grow as tall as the vining indeterminates and do fine this way.

I'm sorry, I've never done Florida weave so can't help you there.

Determinates, which you don't sucker because they are the growing stems you'll need for a harvest all around the same time, get very bushy and wide.

Good luck.

Rabbit did you do a forum search for Florida Weave? Don't tie the tomato stems to the string, weave the tomato stems between taut horizontal strings. I will often wrap the side leas stems around the horizontal threads. I will see if I can find some decent pics from my FW from last year.

camprn wrote:Rabbit did you do a forum search for Florida Weave? Don't tie the tomato stems to the string, weave the tomato stems between taut horizontal strings. I will often wrap the side leas stems around the horizontal threads. I will see if I can find some decent pics from my FW from last year.

Yes I did.  I don't know how to operate the search feature by concatenating terms to limit responses.  The result was that I got 2 pages of threads and only one of them contained any mention of 'weave' or 'Florida weave.'  I found nothing about how it's done or any techniques for managing main stems and offshoots. 

As I stated in the original post, I don't want to damage the plants if I can help it.  I've done that in the past when all I used were wooden stakes and strips of old bedsheets.  If there are do's and don'ts to the weave, I'd like to learn from others' experiences instead of trial and error.  I found one YouTube video but he was dealing with a large field and plants just starting.

I found this. It is quite helpful.