Commercial growers worry about things like ease of harvest and uniformity of fruit size, and they tend to have much more intense disease pressures than hobby growers. People who cage generally just let the plant grow as it will. Pruning is reserved for dying or diseased leaves, aside from aggressive removal of leaves from the bottom of the plant to keep foliage away from the soil. Some people will prune off growing tips once the end of the season gets near in order to try to ripen up the fruits already on the plant before frost. Others don't bother and say it doesn't make much of a difference. Some will cut off the tops once the plant grows as tall as the cage, but others will let the vines flop over the top of the cage and continue to grow and hang down. Regardless, the leaves are where the plant produces the sugars and other nutrients that go into making the fruit, so there's some logic to the idea of keeping as much of the foliage as possible. Disease is what you have to weigh against that, so it's a balancing act. Length of growing season is also a consideration. Is there a point in letting a plant get huge and wild and produce a gazillion flowers and set a ton of fruit if you don't have the time for those fruit to mature before frost? Also, if you want to plant a lot of varieties but have insufficient space to let them all grow into huge, caged plants and are OK with a smaller harvest from each plant, you could prune enthusiastically and grow the plants closer together. It's really a matter of what your goals and needs are.

Thanks, Johnny... the width is something I hadn't considered. I'm planting with 2' spacing so I think I'm going to get the 18" Texas Cages. I don't mind a little pruning but won't do anything near what i did last year. I was doing SFG and really pruned... didn't work for me so well and my friend in Oakland who just threw some maters in a box of American Soil had 8 foot plants that just produced all season non stop. I'm in Walnut Creek and with our heat out here I expected better results than I had and I was totally jealous of my easy-going friends success and here I was all detailed with the SFG approach and it was a total failure. Are your seedlings in yet? Do you plant anything other than tomatoes? (I'm also struggling a bit with how and when to plant my other veggies like squash, beans, chard, and still leave room in the garden to transition to things like broccoli for fall, etc.) I can't seem to find any reliable date from the master gardener program about when to plant things. Do you go by frost dates? And did you get that crazy hail a couple days ago? We did here, and now I realize why the proverbial "they" tells us not to plant maters too early. thanks for your help! -kmama

oldokie, I like your plan. I'm always if favor of working with what you've got. Some of my cages are over 20 years old and I still use them. They might not be pretty any more (if they ever were) but they get the job done. I also have 5 or 6 of my dad's old tomato cages that he actually used to cage banana pepper plants. These are the small three-ring cages sold in stores. They are old and rusty, but when I use them in my garden, they are a small reminder of my dad, who's been gone for over a decade now. I'll use them to cage the peppers in my garden until they fall apart and are unusable. Bon, Supporting the plants to keep them off the ground helps the plants stay healthier and helps keep fruit from having as many pest and disease issues, but there are people who let their plants sprawl on the ground and the world doesn't end. So, if you end up having to let some sprawl, you could minimize disease and pest issues by putting sheet plastic down on the ground (with grass clipping or hay/straw mulch on top of it) to serve as a barrier between the soil and the sprawling plants. There have been times when I never got around to caging a row of tomatoes before they got too big to cage and we still got plenty of tomatoes....and the world didn't stop revolving because I had uncaged or untrellised tomatoes. I've seen people go out and cut the limbs off of cedar trees and use them to make tripods to support their tomato plants. The trees were on their own property so it only cost them their time (and some sort of material to tie the tripods together). Here where I live, cedars sprout and grow like weeds so everyone has plenty on their own property to harvest and use. We have built arbors, pergolas, bean teepees and gates out of cedar at times and it was fun to create something from wood that otherwise would have been piled up to sit somewhere until it rotted enough to be useful as compost. We used thick cedar limbs cut into fence posts for our first garden fence and it lasted about a decade. Although cedar trees are pesky, they're really useful if you cut them up! Bamboo is the same way---invasive and way too happy to grow and spread here, but useful to gardeners in many ways. Carol, The cattle panels are hard to get home and that's why I don't use them. I just buy big rolls of woven wire fencing that, while not quite as sturdy, are easier to transport and then we unroll it and attach it to metal t-posts to form trellises or arches. It is amazing how many ways both cattle panels and woven wire fencing can be used to create all kinds of garden support structures.

I didn't think it was possible, but I have a Caspian Pink, grown from seed, that has overwhelmed and bent a TTC. It is growing on the site of last year's compost pile. I staked it when it went in the ground as well as pushing-in the cage around it. I removed the lower down- facing branches and pinched out a few suckers. Last week on a windy day I noticed the plant listing to one side. At first I thought the plant had just pushed off the top extension, but no, the legs are bent. I tried to support it by driving in poles around the rings to almost no effect. It's going over. I plan to park some old lawn furniture under it so it doesn't touch the ground while ripening its fruit. Maybe I shouldn't have sited it where compost was made. I think I should have pruned more aggressively. Do you guys push in the legs all the way to the first ring? Has this happened to anyone else? -Judy