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Mark Hutton: Hi, I'm Mark Hutton, University of Maine Cooperative Extension Vegetable Specialist.
One of the things we are talking about today is how to handle tomatoes in the home garden.
One of the things I see very often with home garden tomatoes is the use of these tomato
cages. These do work if you just have a few tomatoes. But generally, they are not going
to give the plant enough support if you are growing a large plant with large fruit. It's
going to be difficult to get that fruit out from inside this cage.
Also, as the plant gets larger, you are going to need to give it some sort of support, pieces
of rebar or some stake through either side of the cage, because it's really not going
to hold a strong, large plant.
Other options to use for caging plants would be something like this. This is a cage made
out of concrete reinforcing wire. You can see it has a fairly big opening. But this
opening isn't quite big enough if you are harvesting large Beefsteak or Heirloom type
tomatoes from inside this cage.
It will, however, work well if you are harvesting small cluster tomatoes. Cherry tomatoes or
things like that do work really well in a cage like this.
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