DIY Tomato Arbor

Every year we struggle to keep our tomato plants under control, at the beginning of the year our tomato cages work great but as the plants grow and begin bearing fruit they quickly begin leaning. We've tried staking each cage, but the plant ends up outgrowing the cages and laying all over the ground anyway which blocks our walkways and makes it really hard to harvest the tomatoes as they ripen. 

Last year we decided to move our raised beds down to the sight of our original garden, the trees had grown up and it wasn't getting enough sunlight. While we had everything taken apart we thought we try to solve our tomato cage problem, we had lots of wood left over from an old aviary chicken coop we'd torn down years ago. It's been sitting behind our wood pile waiting to be repurposed for another project. 

One of the main issues with our old tomato cages is that they weren't tall enough to hold the plant upright, another was that it wasn't strong enough to hold the plant and stay in the ground. To remedy this we took 2x4s cut them to 4 feet tall and attached them with screws to either end of our raised beds, between each of 2x4 we wrapped 17 gauge galvanized steel fence wire in three sections. You'll want to make sure that the wire is nice and tight and secured well to the wood. We wrapped ours several times around the board before continuing to the next 2x4. 

We talked about notching the wood or using heavy duty staples to help keep the wire from sliding, but just wrapping it kept it from slipping down. 

We planted 3-4 tomato plants beneath the wire and used small sticks and garden ties or pieces of velcro to support the stock until they were tall enough to reach the wire. We also removed the limbs close to the ground to encourage the plants to grow taller (it also helps to keep the plant more orderly  Once they were tall enough to touch the wire we removed the sticks for the most part and secured the plant to the wires.

This year we are going to add support to prevent the 2x4s from pulling in, other than that we love this system! It held our tomatoes up off the ground and was strong enough to handle the heavy plants. We probably could have cut the 2x4s longer, but we weren't expecting our tomato plants to get 6 feet tall (a couple even went over our arbors). All together we are really happy with these tomato arbors and plan to continue using them in our garden.

DIY Tomato Arbors:

What you need:

2x4s (1 4 foot section for either side of the box- we use untreated wood but you can use whatever you want.)
17 gauge fence wire
Screws
Drill with the proper attachment.
Tape measure
Saw

Directions:

Cut the 2x4s to the desired height, attach securely to your raised bed using screws (we chose to attach it in the center of most of our beds so we still have room to plant other things in them), wrap wire around the 2x4s tightly, you do not want it to sag as the plants get heavier. Make sure that the wire is snuggly wrapped around the 2x4, if you are going to use heavy duty staples or notch the wood this is the time to do it.

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