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+--- Thread: tomato cages (/showthread.php?tid=4126)
tomato cages - allensylves - 05-27-2008
Kahunascott mentioned he was having trouble tieing his heavy tomato plants to the stakes. That prompts me to suggest the alternative that I use.
I take field fence of about 5 feet in height and cut a 4 foot length midway between the crosswires. I then take the cut ends and bend the end 2 inches or so back onto themselves in a loop on one side and about a right angle on the other side, going 90 degrees off from the first side. I bring the cut ends together, take the right angle bend and insert it into the corresponding loop and close the right angle bend into a loop around the other loop. If your wire is light weight, you may want to wrap the loops around to keep them secure. This gives about a 15 inch diameter tubular cage. Before the plants get too big, I put a cage down over them, with the closely spaced wires at the bottom. To keep the cages from blowing over, I drive a 1/2 inch metal conduit stake inside the cage on one side and tie the top of the cage to the stake. If I have a row of cages, I tie each one to the next one, a few inches apart and just put stakes at the ends. Then I let the plants grow up inside the cages without any tieing or pruning off branches. This gives a dense, productive plant with the fruits protected from sunburn and less visible to birds, etc. My plants grow like crazy, so when they get near the tops of the cages, I pinch out the growing points just after the leaf above the top flower cluster, to keep them from spreading over everything. This concentrates the energy on the fruit set below, since the summer rains and bug attacks will start soon and the plants will go downhill in the Louisiana summer anyway.
When I get to Puna, I will probably try rebar because conduit is probably not strong enough for rock. I also may try wrapping the cages in some sort of netting with a fine enough mesh to stop fruit flies and see if that works.
Allen
Baton Rouge, LA & HPP
RE: tomato cages - Carey - 05-27-2008
One of our old neighbors back in Il has rebar cages, 4 longer maybe 5-6', thicker posts with about 1 ft crossbars tied in ... they had a couple of rows of them.... seemed to hold up well....
RE: tomato cages - Hotzcatz - 05-28-2008
welded wire mesh used to reinforce concrete slabs makes great tomato cages but it is too expensive to buy it expressly for that purpose. If you know of any contractors who have scraps of the stuff laying about then it would work. I've got an assortment of wire plant cages made from the stuff welded into different diameters of cylinders. Different heights too so I can grow beans on them as well as tomatoes.
Fences also make good growing supports. We have lima beans covering a good chunk of our backyard field fence. It might be nicer to have a pavilion roof made of fence wire so the bean vines would grow overhead and make shade and dangle the bean pods below where they would be easy to reach. Hmm, growing lima beans on the pavilion would go well for a couple years which would give the grape vines time to fill in and eventually be a grape arbor. Guess all I gotta do now is build the arbor.
Since tomato plants stick around for quite awhile around here, you could build a cage of sticks lashed together. Many folks have waiwai sticks or bamboo growing so those would be free sticks. It is a bit more effort to lash the sticks together but the cages should last for several years.
RE: tomato cages - pslamont - 05-28-2008
I have TONS of Waiwi if anyone needs some. Also, though I have not put it together yet, I hav a big 10 or 12 foot diameter "elderly" reception dish that I will use at the "roof" of an arbor. I was thinking lilliquoi or choyote or something..... I have found several of these dishes showing up on freecycle so keep your eyes peeled!
I just love all these inventions and adaptations. How cool are we???
Just another day in P A R A D I S E !!