05-27-2008, 03:35 PM
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
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
Allen
Finally in HPP
Finally in HPP
