STOP Using Tomato Cages and Do This Instead...

It's ironic, but the worst way to grow a tomato is in a tomato cage. What you need instead is an obelisk trellis. This gives you better airflow, ability to prune the plant, and you don't end up with a toppled-over cage and broken branches. So today, my mom and I are going to put together an obelisk trellis together for her garden so you can know how you can do it for yours too. So do you remember when I first started my business and I had that client, John? He had all these tomato cages that he wanted me to use, and when I returned to his garden after a few months, All the tomato cages had fallen over. The soil was so rich, and the tomatoes just like took off. It was crazy. So that was my sign that I was like, I cannot tend a garden that is full of tomato cages because I literally couldn't get in there. It was such a jungle, and then a lot of his branches actually broke. So that's when I was like, okay, we need a better solution. I think I just had one or two more clients, and then do you remember what you told me that I needed for my business?

I'm like, you need your own line of trellises.

Yeah, you were like, you are gonna have to create a solution for this, all these plants that are growing so big.

Right.

So I left your house with all this bamboo and went home, and that was my first solution that was actually way better than a tomato cage because—

Bamboo is really strong.

Really strong, and also it's much more open and it goes this way instead of this way. But what I did find is that the twine would start to rot and fall apart, and then I was always having to kind of reset Yeah,

you have to redo every season.

Every season, yeah. So it worked, and it is, you know, if you're watching, it is a great like in-between. So the first reason I prefer this over a tomato cage is you can plant so many more plants. On a tomato cage, you would put one tomato right at the center of the tomato cage, but on this, you can plant 3 or 4 tomatoes around the edge of the trellis, which means you get so many more plants. per square foot, and instead of planting in the center, you plant on the outside. The second reason I much prefer it is because tending is so much easier. You can get to all parts of the plant because they're all on the outside of the trellis rather than on the inside of the cage. The next reason is it's very rare that you can get a tomato cage over 6 feet, and tomatoes, vining tomatoes, they all grow— how many tall did yours get this year? At least 6 or 8 feet tall, right?

Yeah, 6 or

With these trellises, it'll support the tomato all the way to the top, which is so much better. You never have that topple-over problem where your tomatoes are falling over because the cage couldn't support them all the way to the top. And then the final reason is that this is more durable and beautiful, so it becomes like an

architectural

feature. Yes, that's the word. My mom knows best. Architectural feature. Another great thing is you can grow so much on this. Mom has done sugar snap peas, fava beans, pole beans, Cucumbers, tomatoes. If you're a gardener who likes flowers, you could do climbing roses, something like that. All right, so I think we have just about finished it. So let's see if we can get this into mom's garden.

All

right, all in one piece. We're gonna go right here.

Mange bon. There you go.

And we talked today about growing on an obelisk trellis, but you know what? You can also grow tomatoes on an arch trellis, and I made an entire video showing you how to do it, and you can watch it right here.