How to Make Your Own Tomato Cages

Store bought tomato cages are undersized, flimsy, poorly made and expensive given the overall quality of product. For about the same cost or less, you can build your own that will be far superior to anything the stores have to offer.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Heavy duty wire cutters or bolt cutters
• Extra field fencing or concrete enforcement mesh or some similar material

1. Acquire your base material:
   
   * If you have some extra field fencing (or similarly meshed fencing) laying around, it makes a very good choice for use in this project.
   * Leftover concrete reinforcement mesh is even more hardy but more expensive and more difficult to come by. Occasionally, construction crews will just give you their leftovers, especially if they're doing a job for you.
   * In my case, I had nothing to start with. After doing the math, it was worth it to buy a couple 100 foot roll of galvanized field fencing. My cost per cage was about the same as buying the ones from the store yet the ones I was building were far superior and would last much, much longer.

2. 
    

   Making the cut:
   
   * Although you can cut fencing with heavy duty wire cutters (or tin snips), if you can get your hands on a pair of bolt cutters it'll make your job much simpler.

3. 
    

   Slice and dice step 1:
   
   * Roll out approximately 6 foot of fencing, cutting the fence right next to a vertical wire as shown on the ride side of this picture.

4. 
    

   Slice and dice step 2:
   
   * Remove the bottom horizontal wire by cutting each vertical (up and down) wire just above it, as shown in the picture. These hanging pieces of wire will insert into the garden's soil to help stabilize the cage.

5. 
    

   Slice and dice step 3:
   
   * Carefully bring the 2 sides of the fencing together, forming them into a circle. Bend the overhangs (created when you made your first cut) so that they overlap and secure the opposite end of the fencing. See picture for how these overhangs will be bent. Note that I don't have them looping over the opposite side in the picture - I pulled the 2 sides apart just so you could get a good look at how they should be bent.

6. Final thoughts:
   
   * Although building your own cages takes a bit of effort up front, in return you'll get many years of use and high quality cages :)
   
   * If you've found this article useful, please rate it accordingly :)

Resources

• How to Manage and Eliminate the Tomato Hornworm