Welded Wire Fencing is a Gardener’s Friend
Because my tomatoes are really taking off this year, I decided I needed tomato cages yesterday. I went and looked at a few, and was very unhappy with the prices. I was looking at $5-6 per cage. That is just to much for some bits of welded galvanized wire. Especially when you consider I needed 6 of them. So, I went in the fencing section and found a role of welded galvanized fencing (3′x50′) for $31. This was the smallest they had and it was more than enough.
What I did was
- Roll out enough to make a cylinder size that I wanted
- Cut the horizontal wires flush with the vertical wire that I want to be the beginning of the left over role.
- Cut the horizontal wire on the top of the cylinder off so that the vertical wire become prongs.
- Use the horizontal wires sticking out to close up the cylinder.
- Place the cage over the tomato plant it was made for. I really should have done this earlier in the year
After making six cages, I still had plenty of fencing left over, so I decided to make a new compost bin. This needed to be larger in size and preferably have an opening I could use for turning the compost. I have some old galvanized metal tomato stakes, that don’t work that well for tomatoes. So, I used a couple of those as posts and did another larger cylinder.
Click picture for a larger version
I will be making another compost bin to hold brown material to be added to the compost pile. It will probably be added to the other bin so that the openings are right next to each other for easy access.
Originally published at Tim's World. You can comment here or there.