Gardening Tip: Growing & Staking Single-Stem Tomato Plants

Here’s the deal. Tomatoes come in two varieties: (1) Determinate (2) Indeterminate. Determinate tomato plants have genetically predetermined sizes and you don’t stake them. I’m doing some of these in pots with small cages. Indeterminate tomato plants do not have genetically predetermined sizes. They will grow indefinitely but they will shoot out zillions of suckers. To get the best yield, you can stake these bad boys and grow as single-stems.

The objective here is to create a single stem tomato plant. Essentially, you’re forcing the plant to grow as one vine. This allows the plant to put all it’s energy into making perfect fruit, rather than trying to do too much.

Suckers

You want to clip off the suckers. What’s a sucker? (Check out pic below). Imagine the very base of the tomato plant there is a stem that goes into the soil. Once this stem grows up, it shoots out branches. These branches produce leaves and flowers, and these flowers bear the fruit.

Suckers are entirely new vines that grow from the same place that the branches shoot out. This vine will produce branches, flowers, fruit and more plants.

This becomes non-linear and super taxing on the plant, and you won't get the best yield. It also becomes a huge plant that takes up a ton of space and you can’t grow other plants in close proximity. Not ideal

Single Stem

Instead, you want to keep the stem clear of suckers. Let this plant grow super tall by tying it off to a stake or string of some kind.

What’s also cool is that you can plant these super close to one another - I usually go the length of my thumb to my pinky as if I’m giving the “Hang Loose” 🤙🏼 and this is how you get tons of yield.

Staking

I’ve been using 8ft wooden furring strips. I’m at least 3 years running with the same ones. If you want to get fancier, of course there are some great options out there:

Tying off the plants

I just use electric tape to tie off the plants. My trick is to cut a long piece of tape. I then fold it over (see picture above) so that it’s no longer sticky. I also like the electric tape because it stretches with the plants and the stems will get larger throughout the season, so don’t choke them. If you don’t have electric tape, I guess you should just buy the garden tape since it is easier to use (no folding required) or it could be worth checking out the clips, but those probably won’t work with the furring strips. You might need the string-style trellis for clips to work.

Shears

It really does make a difference to have clean shears. You want a nice clean cut on the vine.

Professional Style

My parents live inside a quaint farming community and the other day I saw how they were single-stemming their tomato plants. Check out this beautiful work of art: