Donna's Trick

 

More often than I care to admit, I come across a really good idea from one of the many blogs I read every morning. Last week, Donna over at Just Me, posted a picture of her newly planted tomatoes and they looked very much like the above picture with the metal posts driven down through the center of the cages to prevent them from falling over.

Nearly always I have put up those flimsy metal cages only to have them fall over at some point in the season. It never hurts the plant but it does make it a bit more difficult to find all the tomatoes on the bottom side of the plant. It also creates a tripping hazard if unnoticed. I'm not sure why I never put my brain towards figuring out a solution. 

Last year, the final year in our old garden, we actually never got around to putting up those cages because of the timing of our visits and when we finally got down there, they were way to big to cage without breaking a lot of their branches. So we just let them grow freely and although I don't affected yields any, it was kind of a mess trying to walk through them to get to all the tomato plants. 

Donna's trick with the metal fence post seems like the perfect solution. They literally can't fall over now and I hope that means it will be much easier picking. I was also worried about them falling over into the electrified netting and the electricity damaging the plants or the cages shorting out the netting enough that it became ineffective. This solves that issue too. 

Fortunately, I had brought up all our fence posts I bought a few years ago when we raised a lot of dry beans that needed trellising so I had plenty of them. Last year, due to various gifts we couldn't refused, we ended up with around 60 or 70 tomato plants and canned enough of them to last a couple years. This year, I planted 13 of them, gave away several more and still have a few left that my wife is threatening to plant somewhere else, perhaps on our deck. Perhaps it is obvious that we love growing tomatoes, even in an off  year when we said we wouldn't repeat last year anytime soon.