this is john kohler with growingyourgreens.com.have another exciting episode for you today. so, what i'm going to show you today is howto set up and plant out your raised bed garden with tomatoes. so, you can see here, we havea raised bed that was the broccoli bed. we finally got it cleared out. i layered on somenew compost and rock dust on top and it's actually rained a lot so it's actually leveledit out. actually looks nice and pretty, but now what we're going to do is we're goingto plant some tomatoes. so, what i like to use is called the square foot gardening method.also, another form of it is actually called biointensive, which promotes similar plantingspaces like packing plants close together so that you could basically achieve the highestamount of yields and wasting the least amount
of space. now, that it particularly importantin a situation like this. i'm literally in my front year and a standard residential housingtract and i don't have a lot of space and acreage to plant, you know, a lot of plants,so i really go to plant a high density and smaller number of plants because i just didn'thave the room. so, the square foot gardening method, they basically have a couple differentspecifications. so, one specification is for like smaller tomatoes, maybe the determinatetomatoes, and once again i'll go ahead and go over determinate and indeterminate tomatoesif you don't know what that means. basically determinate tomatoes grow to a certain size,generally they're small or they don't just vine out and grow like humungous, and theyput on one large crop and once that large
crop comes on and is put on, then it prettymuch doesn't produce anymore. so, that, once again, is determinate. it has a determinedlifespan, whereas the indeterminate, basically you could plant them, they'll grow, they'llpump out tomatoes, they'll keep growing, they'll grow as a vine, they'll keep growing probablydown your street if you let them if your season is long enough like in the tropics where itdoesn't freeze and they continue to put out tomatoes and tomatoes and tomatoes and tomatoesand tomatoes and tomatoes until, i don't know, i don't know until what happens, until itgot tired, until it wanted to take a nap, but indeterminates just keep going basicallyfor most cases and in most cases like for me, until it gets too cold, until it freezes,and it just doesn't make it anymore. so, for
the determinate tomatoes, they basically recommendone foot spacing. so, basically planting each stem of each tomato approximately one footapart. that's 12 inches. so, i've a tape measure. sometimes i'll also use a yardstick or justa ruler to space out my plants accordingly. now, once again that is if you're going tostake and trellis your plants and train them upright, and i might also encourage you doto what's called the single stem method. i'm not going to cover that in this video, butcheck my other videos for a really good video actually on single stemming your tomato plants.it's really easy. basically you're just punching out the suckers out of the armpits. i mean,literally, that's just what it is. think of just my armpit, and there's a plant out ofmy armpit, and john doesn't want a plant out
of his armpit, so you're just going to trainit up, single stem it all the way up and, you know, once plant per one square foot,it should be fine. so, i'm going to planting mostly indeterminate plants, the ones thatkeep vining out and keep producing tomatoes forever, and i'm hoping that i won't get afrost this year. got my fingers crossed that the weather will be really nice and it'llbe the tropics now in the california. i doubt that'll happen but i could always wish, butin any case, i'm going to plant the tomatoes. because they are indeterminate, i'm goingto give them more space. i'm going to plant them 24 inches apart, so 2 feet apart. so,you can see that, you know, because i'm planting indeterminates, and i'm planting them 24 inchesapart, you know, i can't fit as many as if
i were planting them one foot apart. now,there are pros and cons in planting determinate versus indeterminates, and single stemmingversus not single stemming, and i'm not really going to get into that today, but i'm justgoing to show you i'm planting my plants 24 inches apart. last year, actually 2 yearsago, i did plant them 18 inches apart, and it was just too close and i had small trellises.this year i'm happy to say that i'm using the texas tomato cage. so, this is actuallyjust the top half of the texas tomato cage out here that i'm only going to use for thespacing only. this is not the full thing, but after you see it all built and plantedout you'll see the full trellises. i mean, they're 6 feet tall, and i think this is actuallyone of the key considerations that's going
to make my plants grow a lot better. anotherreason why you want to have some distance between the plants besides lie the roots,letting the roots grow and if your plants are too close together, the roots are tooclose together, they're basically going to steal, you know, nutrients form each other.it's like when you and your brother, you and sister were kids and you'd fight over thatone piece of cake, you know, well, hey, if you each got a piece of cake, you won't befighting, but even me and my brother, we'd be fighting over who got the 2 millimeterlarger piece of cake, so we have a scheme. i'd cut and he'd choose, and as soon as i'dcut i'd say, 'i want that one,' and it would be the smaller one and he would always gofor the smaller one, but in any case besides
just the roots, because, you know, being ableto get the nutrition, above the ground all the plants basically need to get nice airflow and air circulation and also light form the sun, you know. if the plants are too closetogether, they're going to shade each other out and each plant's not going to get as muchsun. if the plant doesn't get as much sun, then it's not going to produce as much fruitfor you. same thing with the air circulation. if there's not enough air circulation betweenthe plants, then that's not good either. so, i've found that 2 feet spacing's pretty good,and get them some space to breath with the texas tomato cages are definitely a reallygood thing. so, next i'm going to start laying out the bed and we're going to use the texastomato cage. so, these are the real bottoms
that go into the ground. they unfold, andthese long stakes go into the ground to anchor this cage into the ground, you know, so it'snot going to wobbly or tip over. it's going to be nice and stationary. once we've outthis in, you can but the extension in that goes up to the top to get it up to the 6 feethigh height. now, i do recommend these tall 6 foot tall texas tomato cages when you'respecifically suing indeterminate, those are the vining plants that'll pretty much growforever until it gets too cold. so, these cages are really good. i mean, these are justserious cages. basically what you're going to do is you're going to make an investmenti these cages and they're pretty much going to last you forever. they fold flat to store.they can be used year after year after year.
i like them a lot. so, next, let's go aheadand do the layout. normally i would do the layout, if i wasn't doing the cages, but usinga standard tape measure and taping off, you know, how far the plants are going to go.i like to use things like these flags or little sticks to denote where i'm going to put theplants, you know. if i'm measuring out, i could measure there, and then i'm going tobasically offset my rows, have 3 rows, put one there, one there, but, you know becausei have the cages, and these cages are approximately 20 inches from end to end, i'm going to letthe cages do my spacing for me. so, if i just put 2 of these cages next to each other, middle-to-middle,it's going to be 20 inches. so, i want 24, which is, you know, my 2-foot spacing. so,we're going to let the cages do all the measuring
for me and it's going to be about right. so,let me go ahead do that next. alright, first texas tomato cage going into place. man, that'snice and solid. fits right in the ground. i mean, this is definitely a sturdy cage.there's cage number one. i just got to do the rest of them. now, as you can see, wehave 2 side by side and we could do like 2 rows all the way down, but what i'm goingto do is i'm going to offset the middle row. so, the goal is to be able to reach into themiddle one between all the space that the ones on the side are growing out. so, withthese cages, it'll make that pretty easy to do. so, let's go ahead and place this thirdrow, or the middle row. so, literally, where i put these cages, right in the middle ofthe cage is where the tomato's going to get
planted. already got 10 cages in the bed.this'll be the 11th cage going in the bed. we got them nice and evenly spaced and, imean, it's just really easy to set these guys up. you just push them into the ground, theselong stakes go right in the ground. i think that's probably about at least a foot anda half, but then you van determine if you want it all the way into the ground or almostto the ground. i think i've basically out them a bit a foot into the ground for eachtrellis. so, let's go ahead and but this last one in. so, there you go. i got all 11 trellisesin place. once again, these are the texas tomato cage, nice heavy duty. they fold andthis is only the bottom half and the top half is actually right here. go ahead and grabon the these guys and this just basically
unfolds once again and then you just needto line these guys up, line them up and put them in there and it's kind of like a littleextension thing. goes together that easy and there it is, there's the full cage made. so,for now were just going to go ahead and keep the bottom halves on and when we plant, youknow, we might just let the plants grow up a little while before we put the tops on becausethis actually get kind of big and it's not quite needed yet. so, i like that you havethe capability or the option of, you know, leaving the cage on full or leave it halfheight. so, it looks just a little bit cleaner, you know, until you really need to cage aroundthe tomato plants. next i'm going to go in the back, get the tomato plants out, and i'mgoing to pant them up. got everything planted
out. worked all good. out the texas tomatocages in the bed. once again, we only put half of them on. the other half's going togo and this is basically going to be 6 feet tall. so, that's definitely going to be enoughsupport for the tomatoes and this is nice 'cause you can reach in. really nice comparedto what i was using in prior years, basically some galvanized fencing. so, definitely reallygood and we're just going to go ahead and let these grow little bit taller before weout on the extensions there. so, no real big trick to planting them out. basically, youknow, i took off some of the leaves and planted them fairly deep, as deep as i could go andso that they'll still be some foliage above, you know. tomatoes you could plant them deeperup the stem because they will root out the
stem. peppers may also do that although i'veheard mixed reports, but with the tomatoes it's always better to bury them a little bitdeeper but other than that when i dig the whole other than burying them deeper i usethis stuff here, just basically microbial inoculant. so, i like that a lot and previouslywe had actually enriched the bed with rock dust and worm castings and some kelp actually,but now it's all planted out. next job is to basically readjust the drop emitters sincewe had one, 2, 3, 4, 5, rows on the drip emitters and we don't need to use all of them. we'regoing to actually plug some of them up, take some emitters out and, you know, just letit drip like normal. let's see. other things i might do, i might plant some basically inhere to go along with. it's a nice companion
pant to the tomato and also plant some marigoldswhich will look really nice probably along the borders, and that'll work out well likeit did last year, just looked really beautiful. so, hopefully you enjoyed this episode learningmore abut planting 11 tomato plants in a 4-foot by 10-foot bed. once again, this is john kohlerwith growingyourgreens.com. we'll see you next time and keep on growing.