What is up everyone? Today we're talking a trellising strategy for tomatoes and

cucumbers that Stephen's been using in his market garden and he actually

adapted it. It's called Lower and Lean but the way that he

approaches it is a little bit different than I guess what you would call the

classic style and it's been extremely productive for him and extremely cheap as well.

So I'm going to let Stephen come in and first of all talk about what it is and why you might want to do it this way and then how he implemented that on his garden and then of course you can take those parallels and perhaps

implement it in years.

All right guys let's talk about one of my favorite crops to grow. And this is the first year I've ever tried

this lower and lean trellis system and wow I've just been amazed by it. It's been

extremely productive. I've got like eight foot plants right now, which normally would be topping out my trellis and then the tomatoes would kind of, you know, shoot out some suckers and some more fruit, but ultimately it's not

going to be pumping out that same perfect production off those fruit clusters every foot.

So lower and lean. The idea of it is that you're trellising a

tomato or cucumber up a single string and you prune it to a single leader.

So you're training the cucumber or tomato up the string.

And when you get to the top of the string,

it's connected to what's called a tomahook. the tomahook has about 30 feet of string wrapped around it and this

tomahook has a little hook on it that attaches to a metal wire above. So basically what you build is a giant close hanger, if you can

imagine it, and you've got lines running down each side of the clothes hanger.

So there's two lines.

And these lines are made from 1-eighth inch aircraft lines,

steel, steel-braided cabling. So it's extremely strong, can hold like 2,000 pounds, you'll never be able to

grown up tomatoes to break it. So once the tomato gets the top of the aircraft line to the top of the tomahook, what you do is you

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