Trellis vs Staking

FRED58 wrote:I didn't think about the holes in the weedcloth. They are five feet long which up here is about as tall as I have ever seen a tomato plant. (even with a foot or so in the ground).

I am going to try a few placed outside the box and some in a conventional garden space. I'll report back in a couple of months.

 Fred, I'm not sure what your growing season is like in your part of Ontario (although I did find out through google that you're in zone 6... is that right?), but here's a tomato I grew here in western New York:


Sorry for the terrible selfie; I just had to take a picture of how tall this thing was.  I'm 5'8, and by the end of the season, it was a foot taller than me.

As for trellising vs. stakes, I go with trellising every time.  I move my plants around every year, and a trellis is something I can use for every vining plant, and the nylon netting has lasted me for 5 years (with some repairs). 

Zucchini, well...  I know they're supposed to be huge and all, and supposed to produce so much that you're just giving it away, but mine has never ever gotten bigger than four squares big, and generally two plants produce less than my husband and I can eat.  This year, I'm going to try something different.  I'm going to make a hill of compost to start the seeds in, and then continue to add compost through the season.  I hear they're very hungry plants, so maybe this will help.

OK, I'm impressed by that tomato.

Kincardine's zone is a bit complicated. We're also listed as 5a and 5b. We just had a very cold winter (Lake Huron froze all the way across again), so we likely had a fair bit of winter kill on the perennials. I read somewhere that we are the northern limit of the Carolinian forest. I have a Catalpa tree, but after a hard winter it either refuses to flower or dies back: I have cut it down twice in the last twenty years, but it always grows back.

I'm rambling. Sorry. Trellis. Good. Stakes, not so much.

FRED58 wrote:I didn't think about the holes in the weedcloth. They are five feet long which up here is about as tall as I have ever seen a tomato plant. (even with a foot or so in the ground).

I am going to try a few placed outside the box and some in a conventional garden space. I'll report back in a couple of months.

Fred, Just to clarify, I was thinking that sticking the stakes outside the box with the tomatoes inside the box was the good idea!