Aw sweet, another success story! Try french weave maybe?

I use a cattle panel and tie them to it. 3 Tee post is all I use to hold the panel up.

We plant the tomatoes pretty close and get 8 plants to a panel.

We put out 80 tomato plants yesterday evening. Received almost an inch of rain overnight. We use sisal twine to tie them up with but any type of twine would work.

oldokie, First of all, I am really proud of us for brainwashing you in only three years. Great job, everybody!

I think busy1's cattle panel method would work well for you, but you also might like the Florida Weave, which I'll link below. I don't use the Florida Weave because every year as I grew more tomato plants I made more cages, up to a point, and then I just staked the determinate types. Every year I look at my pile of cages and think that I have too many, but then by the time I am finished planting, I've used them up. I grow fewer plants nowadays than I used to because a lot of my tomato plants were outside the fenced garden and once the deer found them, I had to plant fewer. You'd think that with fewer plants I'd have too many cages, but now I stack two cages on top of one another, zip-tying them together, so the plants can get really tall. This does mean my plants stay more orderly as they used to reach the tops of the cages and then the new growth would just hang back down towards the ground, looking sort of like the branches of a weeping willow. I'd cut them off before they touched the ground.. I like having taller plants instead of caged weeping plants, even if I have to stand on a ladder to pick the fruit on the upper couple of feet of the plants.

I started growing heirloom, open-pollinated tomato plants back in the late 1990s and my friends thought I'd lost my mind. They'd point out to me, repeatedly, that tomatoes are supposed to be red or, occasionally pink (Porter) or yellow (Lemon Boy). Every tomato you saw on the cover of a book or a magazine was red. Nowadays, you see tomatoes of all colors, shapes and sizes on the covers of magazines and books and I'm not such a weirdo any more. I love a beautiful bowl of tomatoes in every possible color, or salads with bite-sized tomatoes in a multitude of colors.

I hope you have a great tomato year!

Dawn

Click the link below to read about the Florida Weave.

The Florida Weave Method of Trellising Tomatoes

Dawn, on the Florida weave; do you stake them every other plant?

Different people stake them different ways and their spacing of the stakes likely is learned from experience with their soil, their wind (on rural land open to the wind, I'm betting one stake for every two plants, maybe one stake every 3 or 4 plants in a more sheltered urban location with lots of buildings, fences, etc. to block the wind) and their typical spring and summer weather. The Florida Weave is discussed often on the Growing Tomatoes Forum and I imagine a search there would pull up lots of threads about it. Even your stake material and size would play a role in your spacing as a sturdy 6' or 8' tall metal T-post hammered deeply into the soil would support more weight in a high wind event than a wooden tomato stake, for example.

With tomato cages, I start the season with 2 stakes. As the plants get larger and are carrying a heavier fruit load, I add another stake or two as needed. Usually each cage has one metal stake and one wooden stake for starters, and ends up with one metal and three wooden. On a few of the really crazy-vigorous growing varieties like Tess' Land Race Currant, I've ended up with 4 metal t-posts groaning under the weight of a tall, thick, dense fully loaded plant. That's the exception, though, not the rule. In theory, with the Florida Weave, the weight of all the plants sort of pull against one another (picture a tug of war game with a rope) and hold each other up. You don't have that with single, staked cages in a row, so I can use a lot of stakes with heavily loaded plants. Not all plants load up like that, though, so that's why I start with a couple of stakes. Some plants never will need more than two stakes. Some will need more than two by mid-May.

Many, though not all, people who use the Florida Weave find it easier to maintain control of their line of plants with judicious pruning of suckers. In our climate, we have to be careful with the pruning though, as it can remove so much foliage that the fruit sunscald and are ruined.

Indeed, I have read a lot trying to determine the best method. Now that I'm getting closer, I'm finding what I will end up with is determined by what resources I have. Generally, I rule out any weaves because of wind. I fear they'll all topple over in the wind. For now, I'm going to stake them without cages. There is plenty of room. I might double stake them with a weave in between. I'm not sure. I think as the plants get bigger and I watch the wind on them, I'll have a better understanding. Once again, I'm grappling over theories that only experience can provide the answer, like you suggest.

I have some old hog wire left over from 30 yr back I will make some more cages and stack them that would make them about 6 or 7 ft high don't want to spend any more money now and i will dig through the weeds and find the old wire I took up from an old calf and pig pen It should bring back some memories of childhood when we farmed.

I like CRW cages best, then cattle panels, and Florida Weave when I am out of options. Cattle panels work fine, but I like to keep them for climbing things like beans, peas, cucumbers, etc. I need to buy more but they are hard to get home.

oldokie, I like your plan. I'm always if favor of working with what you've got. Some of my cages are over 20 years old and I still use them. They might not be pretty any more (if they ever were) but they get the job done. I also have 5 or 6 of my dad's old tomato cages that he actually used to cage banana pepper plants. These are the small three-ring cages sold in stores. They are old and rusty, but when I use them in my garden, they are a small reminder of my dad, who's been gone for over a decade now. I'll use them to cage the peppers in my garden until they fall apart and are unusable.

Bon, Supporting the plants to keep them off the ground helps the plants stay healthier and helps keep fruit from having as many pest and disease issues, but there are people who let their plants sprawl on the ground and the world doesn't end. So, if you end up having to let some sprawl, you could minimize disease and pest issues by putting sheet plastic down on the ground (with grass clipping or hay/straw mulch on top of it) to serve as a barrier between the soil and the sprawling plants. There have been times when I never got around to caging a row of tomatoes before they got too big to cage and we still got plenty of tomatoes....and the world didn't stop revolving because I had uncaged or untrellised tomatoes.

I've seen people go out and cut the limbs off of cedar trees and use them to make tripods to support their tomato plants. The trees were on their own property so it only cost them their time (and some sort of material to tie the tripods together). Here where I live, cedars sprout and grow like weeds so everyone has plenty on their own property to harvest and use. We have built arbors, pergolas, bean teepees and gates out of cedar at times and it was fun to create something from wood that otherwise would have been piled up to sit somewhere until it rotted enough to be useful as compost. We used thick cedar limbs cut into fence posts for our first garden fence and it lasted about a decade. Although cedar trees are pesky, they're really useful if you cut them up! Bamboo is the same way---invasive and way too happy to grow and spread here, but useful to gardeners in many ways.

Carol, The cattle panels are hard to get home and that's why I don't use them. I just buy big rolls of woven wire fencing that, while not quite as sturdy, are easier to transport and then we unroll it and attach it to metal t-posts to form trellises or arches. It is amazing how many ways both cattle panels and woven wire fencing can be used to create all kinds of garden support structures.

Has anyone used bamboo canes for Florida weave? I only have a few T posts, thought of placing them on the ends and using canes as the middle points. But my whole goal is for them to not flop over and lean into the paths like my flimsy folding cages so I dunno if that will work.

im trying the florida weave this year. I did it years ago and had good success. Last year I just used the old cone cages. I place 1 T post on the end and 1 ever second plant so 2 plant between posts.