Vertical vegetables

Jill Severn

Strolling past a neighbor’s front yard, my eye fell on something I have imagined but never seen: fat, healthy tomatoes growing up a sturdy wire trellis.

A panel of wire fencing — now easy to find in hardware and garden stores — had been attached to two posts with zip ties. So simple, so effective! So easy to take down and store flat during the winter!  

In the past few years, the tomato cages sold in garden stores have been shrinking. Now they are small and wimpy. Those of us lucky enough to have big, old, strong tomato cages are scratching our heads about this.

Have tomato growers lowered their expectations? Are gardeners starving their tomato plants? If and when our old tomato cages ever wear out, or if we decide we want to grow more tomato plants, we need an option. The sighting of that happy tomato trellis is proof that there is one — a simple, sturdy, affordable one. 

Climbing a trellis doesn’t come naturally to tomato plants, but they’re good at leaning on whatever’s handy. On a trellis, they need encouragement and some twine here and there to spread out and tie up their branches. The ones I saw were getting all the help they needed. 

I was glad to welcome tomatoes to the world of vertical vegetables. 

Some vegetables have specialized body parts designed for climbing — usually tendrils that wind around wire fencing, poles, neighboring plants, and anything else vertical.  

Peas and sweet peas are the perfect example of the tendril technique. As soon as the plants start to grow, tendrils emerge along their stems and search for something to hold onto. Once they find something — anything — they wrap themselves around it. They have the opposite of attachment disorder. 

Green beans take the tendril idea to the extreme: They don’t just have tendrils growing out of the sides of their stems; with beans, the whole plant is a tendril.  The growing tip of a young bean plant will move around in a circle until in touches something to climb. Then it will wind its way up to the top. It would rather you didn’t try to help. It’s the expert, not you. 

I’d nominate green beans for the Emmy Award for vertical vegetables. They’re a reliable annual drama, predictable but fun to watch, and with a satisfying ending scene in the kitchen. 

But that prize won’t be easily won this year. There’s competition from the squashes, both butternut and acorn. Somewhere, there may be a new or exotic variety of cucumbers climbing in the ratings. And there’s a longshot: cantaloupes, which in Olympia may or may not make it to maturity in time for this year’s contest. 

The butternut squashes are spectacular. They have lots of curly tendrils, but they need help learning to use them. They also need a strong, giant trellis. They are slow to get started, but once they get going they grow so fast it will make your head spin. 

Three things about butternuts are prize-worthy: first that their vines are strong enough to support a 5-pound squash; second that their ample flesh is so orange, so smooth and so tasty; and third that in a cool dark place they will keep through the whole winter. 

All these upright citizens of the garden take up less space and are less vulnerable to creepy crawly creatures than they if they were on the ground. There are, to be sure, bush varieties of peas and beans, and a long tradition of letting squash and cucumber plants sprawl far and wide on the ground.  

But in garden magazines in the last few years, trellised squashes have become trendy. I’m not an early adopter though; I didn’t grow squash on a trellis until just last year. 

I thought the trellis trend was just now getting to tomatoes, but I was wrong. Auntie Google and her AI boss tell me that people have been growing tomatoes on trellises, and probably fences and heaven knows what else, since at least the 19th century.  

But sometimes it’s easy to believe that what we see is all there is. These days, it would often be comforting if that were true.