Virtical plants in the poly tunnel

Hi,

I recently retired and decided to start growing my own veg; I'm a really novice gardener, in fact the last time I tried to grow anything was about 50 years ago.

For various reasons I decided that I would put up a small poly-tunnel and build raised beds and use the 'square foot gardening' technique.

So I bought a 6x3 meter galvanised steel framed tunnel and built 3 raised beds, 2', 1' and 2' wide with paths between them along its length, and all seems fine.

But how do you grow vertical plants such as tomatoes, because it is a tunnel the walls curve inwards; so if you grow your climbing veg on the north wall, to allow maximum sun to the rest of the crops, any trellis or strings would be slopping towards the centre of the tunnel; if you was to plant them in the centre, for maximum height, any veg on the north side of the tunnel would be blocked from the light.

Any advice would be helpful.

KaySee

P.S. sorry for the verboseness' and the misspelling in the title.

 

That s the problem with polytunnels. Unless they are 18ft + wide its hard to grow much with height.
What about growing trailing tomatoes instead ? Take up less room and you can grow things under them.

 

In the wild tomatoes are a rambling scrambling plant. We grow it vertically for convenience.
What you could do is let them grow up as far as the roof and then either follow the curve or just train them along. I have done both in my greenhouse at various times.

 

I have edited the photo below to better show the supports I used, it makes the tomatoes look awful, but it's the support I demonstrate.

Right at the edge of the tunnel, you get around three foot of straight sides, so I use 3ft canes to grow them up straight. Around the curve of the tunnel I have set some wires in place that run the full length of the tunnel at approx. 15-18 inch gaps.

To the top of these canes I tie a length of twine and I run that loosely behind each wire to the peak and last wire of the tunnel (the twine goes between the wire and the tunnel cover). As the plants grow they are twisted around the twine, so I let it grow 6 inches then manoeuvre the tip of the plant around the twine like a helter skelter being careful to not let the fruiting truss rest on the twine.



The plants grow very well in this fashion.

Steve...

 

I swopped the bolts supplied with my 3 x 6m tunnel for longer ones from Wilkos and used them to fix battens to the horizontal bars (plus all sorts of other vertical and raking supports). The horizontal battens enable me to fix vertical cane supports anywhere I want to, plus the eye bolts screwed into them also enable me to fix vertical or raking strings.

I can even attach cords to pull back the canes closest to the cover so they're parallel to the curve of the tunnel, but not too close as I find tomato leaves attached to supports close to the cover get frazzled. I can get about 60 vertical supports in my 3 x 6m tunnel. Towards the top I attach secondary canes to send tall plants off in all sorts of different directions towards the apex (where there's another horizontal fixing).

 

Like this, sloping curved canes to suit curved sides. As mentioned above I grow beefsteak toms closest the cover that are terminated lower than the likes of Sungolds closest the central path which will be taken up to (and along in a good year) the apex. It may look a bit 'tight' and the top of the inner two rows, but they're staggered and it's not a problem.

I've used strong polypropylene twine rather than weaker jute string to avoid the chance of it snapping and the cane pushing through the cover as it straightens. By next year they should have a permanent set in them.