They can't be too close or the front crop will shade the back one.

I had rather have a trellis along the north side of my bed, but I have them running north-south and east-west. If they are too close you will have a jungle that you wont be able to through.

Larry

While it depends on what you plan to grow on them, I wouldn't put them closer to one another than 4' apart, and 5' would be even better. If they are too close, the plants from each trellis will reach out towards the other trellis and it all will grow together in one big jungle that you cannot get into even to harvest. The plants do not grow flat up against the trellis. They climb it vertically but they also grow outward horizontally so that they are tall and wide, not tall and thin.

Like Larry, I'd prefer to have all the trellis space in my garden run north-west for even sunlight distribution, but because of the lay of the land, they run both ways and I am careful not to put them too close to one another or too close to anything else that the vining plants can reach out and grab. I've had trouble with beans trying to reach out from their trellis and grow on tomato cages 3' away. Now I put the tomato cages 4' away from the bean trellis, and I should be smart and make it 5' this year.

I have a question regarding spacing and also cross-pollination potential.

I'm planting:

6 (plants) - OP (Open-pollinated) Indeterminate Tomato 'Ace 55' Coupled with Long Red Cayenne Peppers (undetermined number of plants)

2 - OP Determinate Homestead 24 Tomato along with Hungarian Sweet Peppers (I think I'll have about four of these)

2- Super Boy (Maybe add a Hungarian Sweet Pepper or two)

4 - Better Boy (With 2 Bell Pepper Plants)

4 - OP Semi Determinate Roma Plants (for sauces and canning) with .. what? My eggplants (which haven't germinated yet, ugh)?

Okay.. For some reason my packets don't include spacing on the packages (for the OP which are from Victory Seeds) including the eggplant.

So, I have the spacing from the generic hybrid packets (Super Boy, Better Boy)

[I'm throwing the eggplants in here somewhere, too. I don't know how many eggplants I'll have. Probably just a couple. If anyone has any suggestions on the successful flavoring from the pepper/tomato companion please let me know. That's up for grabs. I don't have a particular reason except I think the hot peppers might be good with the Roma? I'll also be companion planting basil, oregano and parsley as well as carrots in all of these. What's a good ground cover for the eggplants? ]

What general rule of thumb can apply for these tomato plants?

Note: As you might recall, I have a wind problem. I don't want them drying out but also am attempting the companion planting for the purpose of enriching a "humidity" environment for my eggplants and peppers (if that can be possible at all).

I really don't have spacing limitations as I can always till up more ground for this purpose. I could place some of these at the front (east) of the garden sheltering them from the Eastbound winds.

Now, I don't think I fully comprehend the potential cross-pollination. I certainly don't have experience in controlling this. Can someone give me a realistic idea? Perhaps I should give up on a few plants? I'm at a loss while planning the garden layout.

Dawn, I know you plant LOTS of tomato varieties.

Btw, Bill was out tilling the garden with "Frankentiller" and I attempted to get a picture/video of its awesome redneck style with dirt clouds and grimaced husband holding onto the tiller with the sunset behind him but the pulley broke. Hopefully, he'll have it repaired so I can capture that awesome redneck essence tonight when he finishes up. Love it! =)))

bon

See, wonderful board, wonderful people on the board! I was going to space the trellis's 2' apart, running paralell to each other! Now I will not! beans, cucumbers, squash, tomatoes were going on them. Now I know better!

Ezzirah011 - That would be much too close. I prefer to plant pole beans on a trellis, but because they take longer to start producing, I usually plant an early planting of bush beans. The bush beans don't last very long, so I can pull them up and plant something else and about the time they finish, the pole beans are producing and will continue the rest of the season. I plant pole beans on a horizontal cattle panel and as Dawn said, they grow to the top then start falling over and bunch up together on the top forming a kind of mushroom shape. So although they are near the trellis at the bottom, they are maybe 3 feet wide, or more, at the top. I also grow long beans, but on a taller trellis.

This year I will be growing cucumbers on a trellis and also on the fence because the richest ground in my garden is near the fence where I had a compost pile last year.

Most, not all, summer squash is more of a large bush rather than a vine, but most winter squash is vining. I plant one summer squash that vines called Zucchetta Rampicante which is a huge vining monster. Actually I guess it is both, but we only eat it as young summer squash. I sometimes plant squash in a large container and just let it spill over the top. That way I can put it outside the garden space and use the space for another tomato. LOL

I have grown tomatoes on cattle panels now for several years, but I much prefer tomato cages for them, but love my cattle panels for other things. This year I finally have enough tomato cages (enough ??, well, limited by my space) and I will use my cattle panel trellis for other crops. Cattle panels make a great trellis. They are super strong, they last a long time, and they are not extremely expensive. Their biggest problem is finding a way to get them home since they are 16 feet long.

When we were in the Oklahoma City area this week, we passed a small pickup that had three cattle panels in it. They were folded in a 'U' shape with the ends toward the tailgate and securely tied. I had to laugh, because they were not new and had last years vines still hanging on them. Al said I guess they are moving and taking there panels with them. They were a lighter weight fencing than the ones I have, and they had a rusty look.

ChickenCoupe - Unless you plan to save seed, it doesn't matter how close the tomato plants are to another variety as long as you get good air flow, and it doesn't sound like that is a problem for you. Actually, it is unlikely that they would cross anyway. In my opinion there are a few advantages to companion planting, but I know of no research that says taste will blend. The advantages are for space utilization, and attracting pollinators more than a taste issue. If you were saving seed and selling it or sharing it and needed to insure that it was pure seed, then separation or isolation would be more important. If that is important to you at home for your seed saving then you could bag blossoms.

Thank you, soonergrandmom. I think saving seeds is a bit too much for me this year. Maybe next year when I determine which ones I like.

16 feet! My poor little yard is too small for 16 feet! what I have been doing is going to home depot and getting this wire "mesh" stuff from the concrete mixing area. I get a good 5-7 feet for about a dollar a foot, and I can get it home and in make a space for it. I will making another this weekend. I have a bunch of tomato plants planted and want to grow them all :)

Can you please tell me more about this concrete mesh stuff? How strong is it? I am trying to decide what to use for my trellis too.

CC, I am the wrong person to comment on tomato plant spacing because (a) I plant too many and (b) I break the rules and plant them too closely to one another. Your spacing can vary depending on if you're using cages (my preferred method), trellises, staking or the Florida Weave. It is hard to give a generic answer because some varieties become huge monsters, and some stay pretty compact. I will vary the spacing depending on what variety I'm planting, and I base the spacing on what I remember about how large those specific varieties have grown in previous years.

With determinates, if they are standard determinates I usually space them 24" apart, though some years I plant them 18" apart. With indeterminates, I shoot for 30-36" apart. If I plant them more closely than that, they don't produce as well and tend to have foliar disease issues due to poor air flow. I treat ISIs as indeterminates, and dwarfs get all sorts of spacing depending on how tall or short the dwarf actually is.

Most years, I put tomato plants in their own beds and peppers in their own. I tried planting them together and didn't see any upside at all other than the tomato plants sometimes shading the pepper plants and preventing peppers from sunscalding. I have tried companion planting in many forms and fashions, and have decided that it doesn't really seem to have a big impact. There are some exceptions. I always plant borage with my tomatoes as a companion planting and lots of basil nearby too, and almost never have tormato hornworms on my plants. So, that seems to work for some reason and I keep doing it. The only companion plants I think are worthwhile are the ones that attract beneficial insects to my garden. I interplant veggies, flowers and herbs in the same beds and have done so for probably 20 years.

I studied companion planting intensively and tried it for almost two decades, and cannot say that planting two types of veggies close together ever improved their flavor or productivity or plant health, or that it didn't. Stuff like that is hard to measure unless you are running two separate beds, planted identically except one uses companion planting techniques and the other doesn't. If you did that you could conpare the results and draw a conclusion.

Cross-pollination of tomatoes can occur, but really doesn't happen very often. Tomatoes have perfect flowers, meaning they pollinate themselves inside the flower without any outside intervention being strictly necessary. Usually they pollinate before the flowers even open up. So, most of the time, your flower is pollinated even before a bee visits it. Can bees carry pollen from one plant to another? Yes, but it isn't as common as people believe. I bet it happens less than 5% of the time. It will happen sometimes with certain tomato varieties that have protruding styles as well as with potato-leaved varieties, and sometimes with fused flowers, which also are called megabooms. And, some of my favorite tomatoes began as a cross-pollinated variety or a mutated variety in someone's garden, so cross-pollination is not necessarily a bad thing.

So, put your plants wherever you want and plant them however you want. I honestly think it doesn't make a real difference in companion planting terms. Some people like to really mix things up in the garden, scattering a tomato plant here or there. I like to have all my tomato plants lined up in rows. To me, that is more efficient since they all get the same bed preparation and have similar watering needs. It facilitates a quicker harvest because I move up one row and down the next instead of going from one tomato plant in this raised bed then over to another raised bed where there's two tomato plants, etc.

For companion planting I randomly scatter herbs and flowers all over the place in the garden. I want the pollinators to have to fly all over the garden and move from plant to plant to find what they want so that, while doing that, they'll also visit the veggies, flowers and herbs nearby that need them for pollination.

Canokie, It is Concrete Reinforcing Wire. You can buy it in big rolls (and it is not particularly cheap) or sometimes in pre-cut sheets. It is not galvanized, so will rust over time, but is incredibly sturdy. I am not sure what gauge the wire is, but my dad used the same CRW tomato cages his entire adult life, and he lived to be 85.

Dawn

Thanks to your indirect suggestion I'll be running the garden rows Northeast and Southwest, respectively. In my yard this makes a nice "X". Now, I often have heavy wind blowing West. I was considering the Florida weave as I have at least 30 tomato plants. I don't actually have sufficient cages for 30 plants. I also was considering the trellising type where the line comes down from above? These won't work for me, will they? I fear the stems would snap just as I've seen my pea plants do without that "leaning" support. The cages would provide this. For the missing cages, I suppose I could fashion some wooden ones. Out of all my plants the tomatoes, peppers and eggplants are doing best. Even my bell pepper plant survived the recent freeze.

I desperately need some borage! I've heard good things about it coupled with tomatoes (as well as basil).

CC, I started using the trellis type support several years ago, mainly because I had no storage room for cages. I use "T" post and 1/2" re-bar, being that steel prices have gone up a lot faster than wood I have been using more wood rather than the 1/2" re-bar. I also use a lot of binder twine (hay rope) with the supports. It works fine but it is ugly as a mud fence. Some on the forum use EMT, which I think would make much prettier trellis.

I like the "T" post because I can drive them into the ground deeply to resist my high winds.

I will be experiment with "T" post, 16' cattle panels and EMT. I want to build 2 trellises that hinge from the top to form an arbor that I can walk and till under when I rotate the crops.

Larry

Thanks Larry. I really would prefer the T posts for the same reasons. With the wind, how far apart are you spacing them with the T posts? I know 3'is recommended but I wonder if I can get by with 24" because of the winds.

CC,

I used the Florida weave quite successfully for several years using bamboo. It worked well because I was able to bury the bamboo 2 ft deep. However, now that I've moved to my new space it's not so great. I can't bury the bamboo deep enough, so I'm going to CRW cages this year. Albright steel has a 150' roll of 6" square, 5' tall for $82. You should pick up some rebar to anchor it while you are there. You can make 24 cages from a roll. 24 cages come to $3.70 each after tax, before rebar, which is about the cost of a 6 ft Tpost at Lumber 2 or Tractor Supply.

I plan to bring borage sprouts to the Spring Fling.

canokie-sorry it took so long to get back to you, I had the flu now for what seems like two weeks! Concrete mesh is a wire "mesh" that has holes about 2"x2". The 6x11 piece cost about 7 bucks. I got it in Lowes in the concrete section. If you get it in the garden section you will an outrageous price for a roll of it. So don't do that! I love it!

CC

I place my "T" posts about 5.5 or 6 feet apart in the row and about 4 to 4.5 feet between the rows, but I use a trellis rather than cages. The re-bar, wood and binder twine form the trellis which is about 6.5 or 7 feet tall, I just make it as high as I can reach.

Larry

Seedmama Thank you for that tip. I'll keep that in mind when cash is available and I'm considering expanding. I can use quite a bit of that material for various reasons and that's a good price.

Ezzirah I'm sorry you are sick! I hope you get to feeling better soon! You're not the first I've heard of coming down with something. Being sick sure puts a damper on this springish weather.

Larry Thanks again. I was going to ask how tall. Sounds great.