My tomato plants think the fire escape is a jungle gym now

Last month I moved my pots to the back fire escape because my balcony gets 10 hours of direct sun and they were frying. Within a week the tomatoes had wrapped around the railing so tight I had to untangle them with a butter knife. My neighbor downstairs yelled up that it looked like a green octopus taking over the building. I trimmed them back hard, but now they're reaching for the upstairs balcony like they're trying to escape. Has anyone else had climbing tomatoes take over a shared structure, or do I need to switch to bush varieties?

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joelfoster16d ago

Just a heads up, your tomatoes are actually not climbing on purpose. What they're doing is called phototropism, which is just a fancy way of saying they're stretching toward the sun, not trying to escape or climb like vines. Real climbing tomatoes have special little hooks and they'll grab onto anything, but yours sound more like they're just getting leggy from chasing light. If you want to stop the octopus look, you really do need to keep up with pruning the suckers, not just trimming the ends. Also, switching to bush or determinate varieties would help a lot for a fire escape setup, since they stay way more compact and don't get those crazy long arms. That being said, if your neighbors are already joking about it, you might as well lean into the jungle gym thing, it's kind of a cool look honestly.