A transplanted Southern Californian living in North Dakota Idaho, with some insights on life with deaf dogs, a gluten free spouse, and the occasional mischievous garden gnome. Thank you for visiting and I hope you enjoy.





Saturday, October 1, 2011

Tomato Cage Update

In case you missed it or need to get caught up, you can read previous posts about my homemade tomato cages Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

These homemade tomato cages were an unbridled success, fully supporting the two plants (an Early Girl and a Polish Heirloom) with minimal training of the plants and effort on my part.  Both tomato plants are spilling out the tops of the cages, 6 feet plus in height and have produced an average crop with almost no fertilizing or attention from me.

The cages do make it slightly more difficult to harvest the tomatoes because you have to reach in between the small squares of the re-mash grid, but that's really the only downside. 
This is the other half of the tomato box, the Roma and Amish paste tomatoes, pretty much a complete mess.  I did stake these with the regular tomato cages (the only thing I had left) and the weight of the plants collapsed them in about a month.  This is the "do as I say, not as I do" mea culpa of our blog post today.

The lesson from the tomato caging this summer has been that I need to make a dozen or more re-mesh cages for all my tomatoes for next year.  They worked so well that I want to stake all of my tomatoes (eating, heirloom, Roma/paste, and cherry tomatoes) with this method next year.  Making new tomato cages will be a good fall/winter project for when the weather turns nasty and cold since I can work on this in the relative comfort of the garage.

3 comments:

Karen said...

I've been rockin' on with the stone house, so not much time to post, but after picking my forlorn (or are they lazy?) tomatoes who are all reclining on the ground with their stupid tomato cages tipped over, I can see that your method is Ideal. This will be a must-do project for next spring. You sure have a wonderful variety, too.

El Gaucho said...

Thanks! I hesitate to accept your label of "ideal" only because I'm afraid of angering the gardening Gods. I'm going to go with "worked really well for me", in hopes of not alerting the universe that I'm getting too big for my britches.

Sara said...

And in the off season, you can do this with them :)

http://www.etsy.com/listing/80785196/tomato-cage-ghost-decorations

and

http://redthreaddiy.com/blog/2009/10/diy-halloween-lighted-ghosts-tutorial/