Tomato String Theory

I've had decades of failure with home-grown tomatos.  My main problem has been difficulty supporting the tomato plants.  They'd break, drag on the ground, get bushy, and produce almost no tomatos.  The tomato supports I find at Home Depot or Lowes are too expensive when you have 20 plants or more, they get in the way of pruning and harvesting, and they aren't tall enough.

Last year, I tried cheap alternative method to support tomatos that I read about in a gardeniing magazine.  It led to our first every successful harvest.  We're repeating the method this year.  It involves stringing the tomatos, as farmers often do, but it's incredibly simple and cheap.  For each row of tomato plants, all you need is string, two pieces of pressure treated pine ( 2"x2" by 8 feet), and one piece of 8 foot rebar.

1. Cut the pine so that you can hammer it into the soil without even digging a hole.
   
2. Pound in the two pine posts about 6 feet apart with a mallet.
   
3. Use two nails and tie wraps to hold the each end of the rebar on top of a post.
   
4. Tie a string to each tomato plant,twist around the main stem a few times, and then tie the string to the rebar.
   
   
   
   
5. As plant grows during the summer, continue to twist it gently around the string, until the plants are 6 feet tall with tomatos the size of watermelons.