Walking around Millenium Park in Chicago is the last place I’d expect to be inspired with garden ideas, but the park’s landscape designers have tucked some mid-western, veggie-patch sensibilities into their otherwise prairie-themed beds.
Here, very neatly manicured, is a row of tomatoes, pruned to one vine and staked with bamboo canes. It’s an attractive look, which sets up strong linear rhythms and does away with the shaggy, bushy mess that tomatoes can be at this time of the season.
When you do prune thus, you get fewer but more perfect clusters of fruit. Just watch the water….not only will too much make the fruit taste bland, with only one vine to absorb all that water, the fruit will crack and burst more easily.
In a prior post I mentioned that I was pruning my dry-land tomatoes to three vines, so next post we’ll take a look at how that’s going…maybe not Millenium Park worthy, but perhaps if there’s a Century Park the three-vine toms will merit a spot!