Vegetables Gardening - Growing Organic Vegetables

Group:

I discovered I had not yet written a response to Berlan Crouch's "Award-Winning" question. Here are both his question and my answer:

"Trellising and Pruning - I have finally figured out how to successfully trellis tomatoes but I have not had good luck with winter squash nor cantaloupes. For the squash I apparently don't trim back enough of the vines. They soon reach the top of the T-posts and turn back down but become bushy and viney. I get decent harvests but the row of plants have become a jungle; hard to weed and harvest.I am pretty sure I am not pruning often enough nor properly.

As for the cantaloupe I choose a healthy vine and begin to work it up my baling twine on my T-Posts. I have to be sure to work with it almost every day. If I wait too long and have more than about six inches that I need to redirect upward I end up killing the vine and eventually the plant. The vines just don't like to be manipulated much.

Thank you for your input, Berlan Crouch

Berlan & Group:

Pruning these crops is quite simple, but different than tomatoes. With all of the vining plants you want to limit the plant to one stem, and you do so by removing all sucker stems. However, whereas with tomatoes you remove the sucker stem as soon as you see it start to grow, with cucumbers, melons, and squash you LEAVE the sucker stem ALONE until it produces a female flower.

You then cut the stem off just beyond the first female flower and its accompanying leaf.

This gives you the potential of fruit at every leaf node, all the way up the stem. I say POTENTIAL because it works great with cucumbers, but with large fruit like cantaloupe you should only grow two or three at a time. More than that the plant can't support and it may bring the vine down as well.

The plant will often self-abort extra fruit beyond what it can support and mature anyway, but be aware of that limitation. As one fruit ripens another can take its place, and in a 4-6 month growing season each plant can mature many melons.

You can't prune this way with tomatoes because you would over-burden the plant, since tomatoes produce 4-7 fruits in each location.

Pruning does need to be done often, while the stem is small and
When the plant gets to the top of your string you can let it turn around and come back down, or you can - by lowering the string at the top - allow the stem to sag and bend, and the growing tip can continue growing upright. You will have to manage the bottom of the stem, bending it gently and spreading it out along the bed or box. It's also a good idea to keep it off the ground, so short pieces of 2 X 4 may come in handy for that purpose.

Jim Kennard

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