Using Wire Mesh In The Garden

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Finally, cut the bottom wire off, leaving a set of 6-inch wire legs on each tower. Contrary to popular wisdom, those legs are enough to stabilize the tower, unless you have windy summer conditions. If you're not confident these legs are long enough, use the cutoff bottom rings to make anchors as long as you need. No other bracing should be necessary.

Commercial tomato cages do have one advantage over these towers: They stack readily and you can store many of them in a relatively small space. You can make your wire-mesh tomato towers stackable too, by making them different diameters. Insert a small one into a large one and you can store twice as many in the same space.

Don't make the mistake, however, of thinking you need merely to reduce them a couple of inches at a time. That doesn't work. I recommend making half of them 24 inches in diameter and half of them 18 inches.

When using the towers for tomatoes, plant your seedling so it will be centered, pushing down on the tower until the first horizontal ring is even with or slightly into the ground. If you use plastic or paper mulch, by the way, the towers themselves will lock it in place and you generally won't need other staples or pins.

Beans, peas and cucumbers will need more than the towers' 5-foot height. If you merely wire two of them together, however, the weight of the vines is likely to topple the upper tower. So in addition to wiring them together (using the feet of the upper tower for that purpose), they need to be staked, using two poles on the inside of the tower.

Use the poles to bridge the two towers and staple the mesh to them. For stability, it's also better to use 2-foot—or even larger—diameter towers when doubling them up.

Combined with covers, the towers can also serve for pest control, keeping unwanted insects away from your seedlings.

EXTEND SEASON, CONTROL PESTS

While these towers are basically support structures, they can have other uses. For instance, you can extend the season in either direction by covering the mesh with clear plastic or row cover fabric. Simply wrapping the tower with plastic or row cover can help warm the soil and ambient temperature inside the tower, so you can plant two to three weeks earlier in the spring or extend the harvest season that much further in the fall.

Combined with such covers, the towers can also serve for pest control, keeping unwanted insects away from your seedlings. For instance, I experimented last year with some eggplants grown inside a protected cage and others groan free as usual. Flea beetles all lout decimated the free-growing plants, but barely touched those protected by the row cover.

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