In the past, I have tried to support
tomatoes with those flimsy, circular tomato cages. But they are not big enough, they flop over
too much, and they don’t support enough.
And the past few years, I have just been sticking garden posts into the
ground next to the plants and tying them up as they grew. And that was fine, but it was a mess of
strings and lanky branches. And it
didn’t do well supporting a branch that had a lot of tomatoes on it.
But this year, the elderly lady across
the street has offered to pay me to raise tomatoes in my garden for her. (I’m not letting her pay me. But I told her that I’ll have my sons help
tend the plants and that she can give them a dollar whenever they bring her
tomatoes. It lets her contribute a
little and it gives them some responsibility, like a little job, and helps them
see the reward of hard work.) And since
I really want the tomatoes to produce well this year for her and since she
might be coming into the garden herself to get tomatoes, I wanted to have a
nicer support than just a tangle of strings and floppy branches.
So this year, I decided to make
tomato cages out of garden fence.
In order to make 12 circular cages
that are about 15” across when finished, I bought a 50-foot roll of green,
vinyl-coated, 4-foot-tall fencing with openings that are 2 inches by 4 inches.
And since I wanted to make sure that
each ring was the same size, I counted the top row of spaces along the whole
length of the fence. In a 50-foot roll,
there are 301 spaces, with a little bit of wire-ends left over. That means that if I had counted off 25
spaces for each of the 12 cages, I would have had one column of 2x4 spaces
leftover at the end. But since I didn’t
want to cut it that close (in case I counted wrong or something didn’t work
right), I decided to give each cage 24 spaces.
And here is how I made them:
Step 1: Count off 24
spaces. Use wire cutters (or whatever
you use) to cut down through the 24th column. The 24th space will not have four
sides. It will have one open end (where
you cut it off the roll), and those loose-ends will be what attaches it to the
other side.
This is the 24th space with its loose-ends
Step 2: Roll the
fence piece into a circle, and bend each loose-end around the corresponding spot
on the other side. I chose to bend the loose-ends
around twice, to make it stronger.
Bending it just once (making it like a hook) didn’t seem like it would
hold as well.
Step 3: Because the
2x4 spaces are quite small, making it harder to reach in and pull out large
tomatoes, I made four larger openings (2 on each side – one closer to the top
of the cage and one closer to the bottom).
To do this, I simply cut through the middle of one of the spaces and
then folded the loose-ends back. Just
make sure that you fold the loose-end in the direction where it will wrap
around the perpendicular wire, instead of folding away from it. That way, if the joint breaks apart, it will
still be secure, instead of flapping apart.
Cut through a wire and fold loose-ends back to make larger opening
The spaces are large enough that I can easily fit a gloved hand through
Step 4: And then I will
stick a garden post by each tomato plant (being careful not to damage the
roots) and place the cage over the plant, attaching it to the post to stabilize
it more.
This is the size of a finished cage
And here it is with the garden post
And
that’s it! I’m looking forward to seeing
if this system is more productive. I
know it at least looks nicer.
