The Amish Tomato Method That Grows 200 Pounds in 4 Square Feet

I want to tell you something that still embarrasses me a little bit, even after all these years. For close to twenty years, I grew tomatoes the same way. Every spring, I'd go down to the garden center, grab a flat of Celebrity or Better Boy, bring them home, dig my holes about three feet apart in a nice straight row, drop in a handful of ten ten ten fertilizer, cage them up with those flimsy cone-shaped wire cages, and then I'd spend the entire summer watering, spraying, pruning suckers, fighting blight, swatting mosquitoes, and getting my arms all scratched up reaching into those tangled messes trying to find ripe fruit buried somewhere in the middle. I'm talking about being out there in ninety-two degree heat in July, sweat running down my back, and the plants are six feet tall and flopping over those cheap cages, and I'm tying them up with old t-shirt strips like I'm performing emergency surgery. And at the end of the season, after all that work, all that money on sprays and fertilizer and new cages every other year because the old ones rusted out, I'd look at what I actually harvested and it was maybe sixty, seventy pounds from a whole row. Twelve plants. Seventy pounds. That's less than six pounds a plant. And I thought I was doing pretty well. I really did. I'd bring a bag of tomatoes to the neighbors and feel proud of myself. I had no idea what was actually possible. Legal Notice: This content falls under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, which permits "fair use" for commentary, education, criticism, news coverage, and research purposes. Fair use allows certain uses of copyrighted material that would otherwise require permission. Some visual materials in this video may belong to third parties. For any copyright concerns, please reach out for proper attribution or removal.