The design is fairly straight-forward. You need a minimum of four posts. Each of the posts should be placed in the ground deep enough to secure them. You can set them in concrete if you so desire. The width should be matched to your tomato plants at full size or to whatever is convenient. I chose a couple inches wider than my rototiller, so I could fit it between the posts. The posts have small pieces of wood screwed on as ledges at each mesh height.
The mesh is put onto frames. I used pressure-treated 2x2s for my frames. Vinyl-coated mesh also is a nice feature.
The frames set on the ledges on the posts and can be secured in place by 4 screws (1 into each ledge on each post). To remove the mesh and till between the posts, you only need to remove these 4 screws in each mesh frame.
Here are some views of the finished product:
Fig. 1 A view of the mesh frame sitting on the post ledge.
Fig 2. A side view of the cage.
Fig. 3. The finished product.
2 comments:
looks beautiful! So, do you grow the tomatoes underneath or do you plant them NEXT to the frame and rest the tomato stalks on the shelf? I had thought of doing that (#2) but wanted to see it in action.
I planted tomato plants very densely under the entire frame. The stalks and limbs have to be coaxed a bit to keep them in the frame, but the dense foliage keeps the weeds away. They grew over 6 feet in height. Picking was really easy with the access between the flat frames. A picture with plants can be found here:
http://zone5gardener.blogspot.com/2009/07/veggies.html
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