DIY Tomato Cage

Every year we struggle to keep our tomato plants under control, so we came up with a DIY tomato cage. At the beginning of the year, our tomato cages work great but as the plants grow and begin bearing fruit they quickly begin leaning. We’ve tried staking each cage, but the plant ends up outgrowing the cages and laying all over the ground anyway which blocks our walkways and makes it really hard to harvest the tomatoes as they ripen.

Tomato Cages For Raised Beds

Last year we decided to move our raised beds down to the sight of our original garden, the trees had grown up and it wasn’t getting enough sunlight. While we had everything taken apart we thought we try to solve our tomato arbor problem, we had lots of wood left over from an old aviary chicken coop we’d torn down years ago. It’s been sitting behind our wood pile waiting to be re purposed for another project.

Commercial Tomato Cages vs. Our DIY Tomato Cage

One of the main issues with our old tomato cages is that they weren’t tall enough to hold the plant upright, another was that it wasn’t strong enough to hold the plant and stay in the ground. Regular tomatoes are not as tall so they would be fine with these normal cages, but heirloom tomatoes get quite tall. To remedy this we came up with a DIY tomato arbor which is much taller and stronger then the cages and able to keep up with the plants as they grow.

What You Will Need For Your Tomato Cage

We took 2x4s cut them to 5 or 6 feet tall and attached them with screws to either end of our raised beds, between each of 2×4 we wrapped 17 gauge galvanized steel fence wire in three sections. You’ll want to make sure that the wire is nice and tight and secured well to the wood. We wrapped ours several times around the board before continuing to the next 2×4.

We talked about notching the wood or using heavy duty staples to help keep the wire from sliding, but just wrapping it kept it from slipping down.

You could also run goat fencing along the 2×4’s and fasten your tomatoes to that as well.

How To Plant With These DIY Cages

We planted 3-4 tomato plants beneath the wire and used small sticks and garden ties or pieces of velcro to support the stock until they were tall enough to reach the wire.

We also removed the limbs close to the ground to encourage the plants to grow taller (it also helps to keep the plant more orderly Once they were tall enough to touch the wire we removed the sticks for the most part and secured the plant to the wires.

This year we are going to add support to prevent the 2x4s from pulling in, other than that we love this system! It held our tomatoes up off the ground and was strong enough to handle the heavy plants. We probably could have cut the 2x4s longer, but we weren’t expecting our tomato plants to get over 6 feet tall (a couple even went up and over our tomato cages and then up the top of our cattle panel arbors). All together we are really happy with this tomato arbor and plan to continue using them in our garden.

How To Make Tomato Cages From Wood

What you need:

2x4s 1- 5-6 foot section for either side of the box- (we use untreated wood to avoid the chemicals.)
17 gauge fence wire
Screws
Drill with the proper attachment.
Tape measure
Compound Miter Saw

Directions:

Cut the 2x4s to the desired height. Attach securely to your raised bed using screws (we chose to attach it in the center of most of our beds so we still have room to plant other things in them). Wrap wire around the 2x4s tightly. You do not want it to sag as the plants get heavier. Make sure that the wire is snuggly wrapped around the 2×4. If you are going to use heavy duty staples or notch the wood this is the time to do it.

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