Convertible Tomato Cages: How to Make

Description

These are large durable cages that you can easily make. They can be used as cages or when laid over as row covers for early spring or fall growing. Just use woven field fence wire. The cages can collapse, two or more can also be connected to make compost piles. It's simple.

Tags: garden,howto,tomato,cage,collapsible,convertible,row,cover,cold,frame,prepper,preparedness,food,growing,simplifying,survival,training,perry,peacock,compost,wilderness,diy,how-to

Video Transcription

wilderness and innovation real survival kids survival shelters simplifying survival and wilderness innovation calm ok we're going to start off with part of a role of some steel fencing and I'm going to make just under two foot diameter tomato cage alright the first thing we're going to do I put a little weight back here on the wire just so it'll hold flat and all we're going to do is all right now you're doing a bunch of these you can set up like this and roll your role your role on out there and just drag your tape measure or what I used to usually do is cut a stick 76 inches long or so but come up to your 76 inch mark make yourself a cut and then set your tape measure and go out another 76 and then you make yourself another cut set your tape measure come on out here

now you can see where it's 76 inches here and what you want to do is just you don't want to you know worry about exactly being on 76 or whatever you want to come as close as you can and you want to cut halfway between these two sets a wire here so we're splitting the difference and it happens to work out on this batch here right there alright so what I'm doing a batch of them what I'll do is come through I marked like I just said I marked my just cut one wire on the outside what I'm gonna do is skip thing in the middle wire keep on going since I'm doing a bunch of cages at the same time it's easier not to cut them all into individual things because they all roll up on you don't buy leaving one that kind of leaves it flat makes it easier to cut the others so anyway what I used to do was I used to I had a hundred and fifty foot long driveway at my old house and I just start the roll at one end and I'd roll it all the way out to the end and I do this whole process all the way to the end of the driveway

make my cuts and then then I'd go through and make my final cut where I cut that last wire say I've cut all the wires except for one right in the middle all right now you can see I've got a series of cages I got four of them cut out here kind of next to each other now we're going to do our next step which allows us to put them together right so one reason I like to do the cages how I'm going to show you is because you can take them apart so they're not always hooked together and you can make a half circle deal like this and you can throw a piece of plastic over the top of it and you can anchor down the sides of the plastic with a little bit of dirt in the bottom here you have plants in there so it gives you kind of a plant tunnel and you can do a whole row of these things connected together and make you kind of a little grow cover for the early spring or or late fall crops to protect them from frost and everything and then when you're ready to use them the other way you just stand them up and pin them and you've got round cages I'll show you how to do that right now okay in order to hook your cages together we need to make some eyes in the end of the in the end of the wire on each wire and the easiest way to do that I've messed with all kinds of things but just take an old hinge or whatever pull the pin out what you want to do is you want to save this piece and what we're going to do is we're going to put the pin back in here we're going to let it stick out this side here because we're going to use this as a little bending tool very effective and it's cheap all right so you're gonna do here just stick the wire I think you can see that you're sticking this piece of wire in between the gap and the pin right here you know this outside one is a lot harder it's quite a bit stiffer than the other wires but if you can get that get the rest of them and I just grabbed this thing here and push like push down right here just push down and just bend that thing around like that okay so now you can see we've just made an eye right here

and that's what we're gonna do all the way down here is they're going to make an eye on each one of these wires on both sides now these little these little ones are a lot easier to do and so you start in this down down position here and all you needs a 8 there quarter well about a quarter inch of wire sticking over and ideas just bend it around and we're just making ice just make them little eyes on the wire all the way down here okay that's all there is to it's very very simple and all these ones in the middle are easy to do the TN ones are a little tougher alright the next thing we need is we put eyes in our all the way up and down our cage here now you need a pin to go through there you can use whatever you want that will fit in there but I've got this roll of electric fence wire 14 gauge works plenty good all we needs about five feet of this so I'm just going to cut off about five feet the next thing we do here is just take the wire just kind of run it through your it's kind of run it through your hands you just kind of bending the curve out of it a little bit it's not really critical what you do here just hard is just straighten it up enough to work with a little bit and that's all we got to have like that all right so here's what we're going to do we've got our two eyes of the heavy-duty wire on the bottom of the cage what I'm going to do is just take this piece of wire and I put it through both of those eyes now there's something that's very helpful I've got this one here's on the left side and that one's on the right so what I want to do when I come to the next one here is I'll do it the opposite way and then I'll do this next one the other way so I'm doing as I'm alternating left us first here or front or back whichever you want to say you're just alternating these if you don't then this thing can shift like this so all right so I'm just continuing through here alternating left and right these little loops

you can kind of understand when you start doing it just tightens everything up so here I am at the very end here and I've got some slack in the end I'm just going to bend that over like that I'll do that same thing on both ends and I'm done so if you look at the ones I've already got in here these couple here so I've got the small wires at the bottom and the bigger ones at the top and all the way the top so this is Perry peacock with your wilderness preparedness tip on gardening how to make these 4 foot tall a little less than 2 foot diameter tomato cages very quickly very simply you can really crank these out enjoy your gardening and can it all up use it up fresh be prepared