Like football teams, many commonly grown vegetables are on a hiding to nothing without decent support.
Tender beans and tomatoes, for example, whether planted outdoors or in polytunnels, clearly need staking. Tall varieties are fairly straightforward. A bamboo cane, or, preferably, an ash pole will do the business for cordon - indeterminate - tomatoes, and the classic runner or French bean frame works for tall varieties.
For me, the runner bean frame is a sure sign that summer's upon us. With plenty of ash saplings to coppice, I scour my ground for good, straight specimens. I arrange the poles in two lines, 60cm apart, with 15cm between each pole along a line. They each pair up with one from the opposite line. Two horizontal poles join these pairs above and below where they cross at the top. If you've ever done this, you'll know it's not a job for one person. So far, so good, but diagonals must be fixed along each line to keep the structure rigid. Runner beans, and, to a lesser extent, French beans should be allowed to grow to at least 2 metres.
In warm Mediterranean parts, low-growing beans need little or no support because the soil surface is fairly dry and devouring molluscs are not a problem. But here in Scotland, you need to keep dwarf beans off the ground.
The challenge is finding good supports for these varieties. Although link stakes come in different sizes, they won't provide the necessary support close to your plants' main growing stems. Gardman conical support rings measuring 60cm x 26cm, when sunk in the ground to the first of three horizontal rings, allow a bean to grow through the circle and provide support for fruits at different heights, making harvesting easy.
An alternative is a planting grid, but it does need modification. The model, sold by Harrod, is designed for use on the ground in "square foot beds" but it will work if you raise it off the ground by lashing 60cm-tall bamboo canes to the structure. This unit is 1.2sq m, with large, square holes for plants to grow through.
The fruits will lie partly on the grid and hang through it, so those in the centre would be more difficult to harvest. With DIY skills to the fore, I have used homemade equivalents but have always found harvesting a problem.
These grids are a better, but not perfect, option when used for bush tomatoes. These compact bushes produce lots of branching stems, some from just above ground level.
To keep them clean, these tomatoes must be kept off the ground. So you need to be constantly vigilant, training each new stem through and above the frame. Inevitably, as the plant grows, you'll miss a few growing points and the fruit will be harder to reach.
Grow-through support rings are probably better. Use a 41cm-wide ring for each plant, tweaking growing shoots through the ring. The tomatoes will lie on the support, well above ground level.
I'm far too mean to buy off-the-peg equipment at the garden centre, so spend ridiculous amounts of time trying out endless methods with free material from the garden. With bush tomatoes, I've created a maze of strings between sticks in the vain hope of suspending the trusses from the strings. And I've tried draping the trusses over Y-shaped sticks - this nearly works.
Luckily, though, I've stumbled on something that does work. Fan-shaped hazel branches work well. Coppiced ash and elm also produce strong horizontal and slightly angled sideshoots along straight stems. They support tomatoes and beans perfectly. If you have trees and shrubs with strong fan-shaped branches, try letting these prunings support your vegetables. They also work with taller delphiniums and irises in the border.
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