too-tall tomato plant and uncooperative zucchini flowers

[sarea_okelani]

One of my tomato plants has just about reached the top of the trellis. What do I do once it gets there?? *wibble

Comments

[nutmegdealer]

the male flowers always come first. the female flowers will have a small fruit at their base.

[xtricks]

Tomato: let it grow. It'll droop around just fine on it's own. Or, you can pinch the growing tips and get a 'bushier' tomato.

Zucchini -- why are you hand pollinating it? Is there a particular problem with no bees/beeflys etc in the area? Zucchini are not delicate plants and rarely require special pollination efforts.

[sarea_okelani]

Oh, because there aren't a lot of pollinators in my area, and I've read about other people having woes on that score, so I figured I would just pre-empt nature and do it myself, since it seems fairly easy.

Yeah,

[sunflowerlmj]

Let the tomato hang.

[bailey36]

I tie my tall tomato stalks up, they get taller, I get taller and taller bamboo sticks to tie them up I can look out my window and can see one plant that's over 7 feet tall! they produce like crazy, I used to cut them but it stunted them.

[dangerduckie21]

The tomato plants can be left to hang down but at a certain point I had to start a sort of ghetto Florida weave with cloth tied between the tops of the stakes. That point was when my unpruned plants had several 10+ feet long vines and were suffocating the bottoms of the plants (last year the same seeds only grew about 6' so I wasn't expecting this at all). If you've pruned your plants you might have better luck just letting them hang, but if it gets ridiculous that's also an option :-)

(If you're unfamiliar with the Florida weave, here's a link: http://www.foogod.com/~torquill/barefoot/weave.html)