DIY Tomato Cage For Raised Beds

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.

 

We knew we had to do something because our traditional tomato cages just weren’t working- so we did some sketching and came up with this super simple DIY tomato cage. 

 

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DIY 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 was taken apart we thought we would try to solve our tomato arbor problem, we had lots of wood leftover from an old aviary chicken coop we’d torn down years ago. It’s been sitting behind our woodpile waiting to be repurposed 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 than the cages and able to keep up with the plants as they grow.

 

How To Plant With These DIY Tomato 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 DIY tomato cage and plan to continue using them in our garden.

 

How To Make DIY Tomato Cages From Wood

 

What you need to make a DIY Tomato Cage:

 

Directions:

 

Step 1: Cut the 2x4s to the desired height for your DIY tomato cage (now is a great time to decide if you are going to be growing determinate, or indeterminate tomatoes- you can read about growing tomatoes in this article). 

 

Step 2: Attach your 2x4s 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).

 

Step 3: Wrap the wire around the 2x4s tightly, (if you want you can staple it in place). 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. You do not want it to sag as the plants get heavier, if necessary you can tighten the wire down by twisting it. If you are going to use heavy-duty staples or notch the wood this is the time to do it.

 

 

How To Attach Tomato Plants To Your DIY Cage

 

To secure your tomato plants to the DIY tomato cage, you can use velcro garden stripes or twist ties. Wrap the twist tie (or whatever you are using) around the wire, and then around the branch. Gently secure the plant to the wire. Continue attaching the tomato plant as your plant gets taller.

 

Check out our Amazon Storefront for all of the supplies you’ll need.

 
Have a question about building a DIY Tomato Cage? Drop them in the comments and we will try to answer them.
 

 
 
Before you go, check these out!
 

 

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5 thoughts on “DIY Tomato Cage For Raised Beds”

  1. Samantha Strawbridge

    When I initially left a comment I appear to have clicked the -Notify me when new comments are added-
    checkbox and from now on each time a comment is added I
    recieve 4 emails with the exact same comment.
    There has to be a means you can remove me from that service?
    Cheers!

  2. I don’t understand how the plants would keep from sagging as they grow bigger. How do you secure them to the arbor?

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