Thoughts on Tomato Cages

                Home-made tomato cages usually take one of two forms. Either a little over six feet of four –foot  fencing is rolled into a cylinder  or two four- foot lengths of fence are bent into “L” shapes so that when put together around a tomato plant the two pieces form a cubic cage. The principle advantage of the “L” shapes is that they store in a very small space, one atop the other. I tie my tomato cages with strong twine from any straw bales I open rather than wire them into cage shapes. This allows me to easily open up the cages when the tomato season ends with the first frost of October and use both the cylinders and the “L” shapes as the framework for cool weather cloches for crops like lettuce, kale, radishes or carrots. Another cold weather use for cylinder cages is to open two of them up and retie them together to form a cylinder twice as large as the originals to hold compost rotting over winter or to hold the brown material autumn leaves that are raked in November. Whenever you decide to turn the compost, just pull the fence cylinder off the material and then refill it. These compost cylinders sit right in the garden so the material is handy and available for the next gardening season. A third winter use for tomato cages is to hold down winter mulches, such as those over asparagus, rhubarb, or carrots. Strong winter winds can blow mulches and sheet composting of leaves and straw off of the beds and out of the garden. Just flatten the cylinder cages a little and lay them over the leaf and straw mulches. Next May all the cages can be reformed and retied with a couple short strands of straw bale twine and they are again ready as tomato cages again. In summer, a tomato cage also makes a good structure to allow a hill of three cucumber plants to climb up.