Using Wire Mesh In The Garden

Enlarge Image Image Gallery These wire towers can support full-size tomato plants, and you can make season-extending covers for the cages. Christine Erikson

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Wire mesh is at the top of my list of things that make vegetable gardening easier and more efficient. Intended for reinforcing concrete, the stiff 6x6-inch wire mesh makes perfect cages to support tomatoes or other tall crops. It also works beautifully for constructing trellises and fences. Combine it with plastic sheeting or row cover fabric and you can make minigreenhouses for season-extension and isolation cages for protection against pests or to assure seed purity.

Understand: I'm not talking about woven-wire fencing. Although woven wire can serve many of the same functions, it is expensive (due to galvanization and manufacturing methods) and difficult to work with (because of the hardness of the wire). Concrete reinforcing mesh, made of softer, 9-gauge wire, is inexpensive, stiff enough to make sturdy cages and easy to work with using pliers and wire cutters.

You can usually tell the difference just by looking at the mesh. Concrete-reinforcing wire oxidizes easily and often is already rusted when you buy it. Woven wire, because of its galvanized coating, remains bright for many years.

Reinforcing wire comes in flat panels measuring 10 feet long, 50-foot rolls and 150-foot rolls. In all cases, the mesh is 5 feet wide. The single sheets are the most expensive, and the 150-foot rolls are the cheapest. Depending on where you live, a 5x150-foot roll of mesh costs $50 to $60. Given the number of uses it has in the garden, it makes sense to buy the longer rolls.

The simplest method of using the mesh is for straight fencing and trellising to support tomatoes, beans and other vining plants, such as cucumbers and even melons. For instance, Scott Benson, in Upstate New York, grew out 100 tomato varieties on such fencing last year. Scott used 5x10-foot panels for this, because he feels it is aesthetically more pleasing and has safer edges than panels cut from a roll: an important consideration for him because his grow-out was part of a high school project.

To erect them he used 6½-foot steel T-posts spaced 5 feet apart. The wire mesh was attached using pull-tight plastic bundling straps. He wound up with seven 70-foot rows that stood up to "the fiercest winds we've had in a long time."

Mesh makes neat, perfectly even fence rows. At $5 a panel, the wire cost Scott $35 a row. Using rolled wire, that same row would have cost less than $25 and would have required fewer T-posts. It would, however, have waves and warps instead of being perfectly straight.

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