Lurker/newbie with tomato "cage" question

straymo

We've never used cages before for our tomatoes and have used wooden stakes and cloth strips in the past to tie them up. I was never really pleased with the method and looking for a better way. 

Do you guys use the cages? If so, what kind?  TIA

We didn't have a garden last year and still consider ourselves newbies so any help you can toss our way would be appreciated.

curlydoglover

I use cages.  They're perfectly cylindrical and are SLIGHTLY tapered closed at the top.  I haven't had a problem with them though I'm considering trying to trellis one this year and see how that works.

My sister used square, collapsable ones last year that looked quite clever and easy to store.

Jeff & Em

I use ones that look like this:

I have one cage that came with the plant I bought last year.  It worked OK.  I imagine you'll need to remember to put them in before the plants get too big so they'll use the cage for support without you having to pull the branches and leaves through.  I'm sure it will stack with other ones we get for storage, but I'd love to try the ones that fold flat!

kastle

I, personally, like stakes.  Last year my tomatoes were almost 6 ft tall & I used a 10 ft. bamboo rod as my stake.

dirtyred

Personally, I think the stakes work better.  The cages only go about 8-10 inches into the ground, so if it gets windy during a thunderstorm or the plant gets heavy, the cage bends or falls over.

goldenjes

I did both last year. The round cages worked fine for all of my cherry & grape tomatoes. The Juliets were a little heavy for the regular-size cages though.

I used the bamboo-type teepees (some non-wood that are supposed to last longer) for the Romas, but didn't keep them enough on the outside of the teepee so they were tough to pick.

For my Better Boys & Beefeaters, I had some in the giant round cages but those fell over unless staked. Both types seemed to do well with teepees.

After helping me pick tomatoes last year, DH got frustrated and volunteered to build huge fences for them all to grow up. It's his way of contributing--and I think he felt bad for not believing I could actually grow a garden. 55+ pounds of tomatoes and buckets of squash & peppers proved him wrong.

Nebb

I used a combination of stakes and cages last year - we had a very wet summer and the plants grew out of control and quite tall (taller than me, at 5'1"). We started with the cage but when they got too big and were flopping over we added large bamboo stakes as well and tied with twine and had no problem with that. I wish we had put the stakes in earlier though so it would have been easier to manage. Im still a gardening newbie myself, that was my first try at growing tomatoes!