Growing your garden is a political act. I am not the one who says it, Pierre Rabhi is.
And where politics is involved, it often implies doctrine, majority, opposition and protest movements.
You must be wondering what got into me or what I put in my morning coffee! Rest assured, it is about growing, pruning and management of tomatoes that I will talk about today, since it is a perfect example of a subject that divides gardeners.
Indeed, for decades it has been accepted that tomatoes, with an iron hand in a rubber glove, are firmly staked, are trained with rigour and are pruned. It is a tradition with strict rules: plants standing to attention on unyielding stakes and the systematic, merciless removal of "suckers". Order and method.
Everything would have been simple without the arrival of a new generation of gardeners, rebellious enough to question what they consider horticultural myths. Above all, curious or cheeky enough to experiment with alternative methods such as growing tomatoes in cages, laid flat on the ground, free and unpruned, and even without water.
Sterile protest, dangerous laxity, or the start of anarchy? (Tell me how you grow your tomatoes and I will tell you who you vote for...)
But before commissioning pollsters, let us explore these different, not exactly conventional methods...
Tomatoes in cages: supervised freedom
Putting into a cage to free may sound somewhat contradictory. In practice, let us say it is freedom under supervision.
This method consists of growing tomatoes without pruning, surrounding plants with a wire cage to support them and contain their abundant foliage. These cages have a double advantage: they free the gardener from both the slavery of hunting "suckers" and the servitude of daily watering, thanks to the water reservoir provided within the cage itself. To make them, we have prepared a step-by-step tutorial that explains everything: building a tomato cage
Tomatoes also benefit from this technique: unpruned, they no longer have wounds and therefore suffer fewer diseases. The axillary shoots, once removed, produce flowers that turn into fruit, thus offering larger harvests than with conventional training.
Tomato growing in cages - Photo: "Le sens de l'humus"
Tomatoes without stakes or pruning: independence, plain and simple
The principle could not be simpler and suits lazy gardeners perfectly since you simply plant the plant (preferably laid on its side, its favourite position) and let nature take its course!
Tomatoes naturally run along the soil. Only constraint: keep them away from moisture with a thick mulch made of dry materials (straw, dry grass) or with crates. Like squashes, your tomatoes will spread out… The advantage is obvious: you will have nothing to do except harvest. But beware, this method requires space and the absence of mice, voles and other burrowing rodents that would be delighted to sample them.
Note, incidentally, that it is perfectly possible to grow tomatoes in a traditional way without stakes. For this, choose determinate varieties, which form a bush more or less "self-supporting"… depending on wind strength. This is the case for the tomate buissonnante (… merciless logic) but also for dwarf and cherry varieties such as Totem or Gold nuggets.
And tomatoes without watering? A revolutionary alternative movement
Change is now… so let us start by turning off the taps! Because growing tomatoes without water is possible and Pascal Poot proves it, cultivating no fewer than 450 varieties, never watering them. But there is no magic powder here — just a long process that consists of "teaching" vegetables, over generations of seeds, to live frugally, with a guaranteed minimum of a simple dose of compost.
Here is the demonstration:
And you, are you more in favour of maintaining order and mandatory depilation of the axils (of the tomatoes… needless to say) or do you campaign for the mass confiscation of stakes and pruning shears?
Come on, I admit it, at home we are more the good-pupil type who lack consistency: we remove the suckers during the first weeks only to end up delightfully overtaken by an uncontrollable jungle that seems to proudly wave a sign: "Long live the free tomato"!
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