Unprepared For Success

With the utter failure of our very first Florida veggie garden and the doom and gloom stories of how hard it is to grow down here, I had slim hopes that we would be able to grow much of anything at all. To my amazement, the plants grew! And grew and grew. And grew some more. Before I knew it, the tomatoes had overgrown their cages. At the time, I thought it was no big deal. The plants would just be tall, no biggie. Right? Then the tomatoes came in and they grew too! And grew and grew. And grew some more.  The weight of those green globes along with a lack of support resulted in the bent and cracked stems in these pictures.

Some of the branches couldn't be saved, like the one that turned brown here. Some had just started to crack so I put some flexi garden tape around the damaged area in hopes that it would heal over like in the picture below. Effective but not too pretty.

Here is a shot of the towering tomato plant with some repair work:

The hot mess below was an attempt on my part to support the cherry tomato that was growing out of control. I just started to wrap it around the neighboring tomato plant. In hind site, not one of my finer ideas. Since I really didn't expect anything to grow very well or for very long, it seeded like a gem of an idea at the time. Well, it just grew into a big tangle.

Here's a closer look.  That long skinny branch at the bottom of the picture is the cherry tomato beginning to wrap around another caged tomato.

This here is a big old floppy branch that I'm holding up. I ended up draping it over some nearby trellis. It's still going strong.

After a few more weeks, I couldn't stand letting the tomato plants fend for themselves so I tried to separate the hot mess I mentioned above. Boy was that an adventure, and not in a good way! I had the Hubby holding up one part of the plant while I had the other, all while trying not to break anything and thread it through an extra upside down tomato cage.  Here 's how it looked afterwards:

That is indeed an upside down heavy duty tomato cage that is zip-tied to the top of another heavy duty cage.  You can very clearly see this over our 6 foot privacy fence, the neighbors must think we've lost it.