Remove wire. The nursery told me not to remove it. I asked why not. The answer was "So if in case it dies, it will be easy for us to remove." Then they even scared me that if I remove the wire and the burlap, and it dies, they won't replace it. So right after the people who installed the honeylocust tree left, I removed the dirt and used my dremel tool to cut the wires. The I also removed the burlap. This was year 2007. This month when I was building my patio, I was so shocked with what I saw. I was removing the dirt and about 15 ft away from trunk of the honeylocust, I saw a yellowish/beige root about 1/4 inch in diameter. I followed it and at about 7 ft from the honeylocust's main trunk, the diameter was 1 inch. Unfortunately, I had to cut it since it was affecting my patio project. I cut it as close as 18 inches. I still saw many roots as I went along with the project. I did the about a month ago. I'm lucky that the honeylocust tree is still fine. It might stunt the growth next year. So yeah, remove the wire and the burlap.

For a couple of years I had a garden spot away from my house, with no water supply available so if I wanted to supplement rainfall I had to haul gallon jugs of water. To make my watering efficient, when I planted my peppers & tomatoes in the spring, I dug down and buried empty gallon plastic jugs, one between each plant. I had poked 4-5 holes in the bottom of each, of course, and left the caps on until later in the summer. Once the weather warmed, and after a good soaking rain, I mulched the beds 4-6" deep with chopped leaves, being sure to cover the tops of the (so far empty and still capped) bottles to protect them from the sun since I had found that the plastic degrades and becomes brittle when exposed to the sun. (In previous years, just cultivating around the bottles inevitably resulted in my breaking the tops off by midsummer.) When the weather reached a point where I actually needed to water, I cleared the mulch away for the moment and poured a gallon of water into each buried bottle. I set the cap loosely back atop each bottle to keep the leaf debris from falling in and clogging the exit holes in the bottom, then pulled the mulch back up to protect the plastic. I did not care about how long it took for the bottle to empty-- it seemed like a gallon or two a week per plant was sufficient, and the best part is that by burying the bottles the water went right down to the root zone where it was most effective. As for using wall-o-waters, since I had gotten some free from a friend, I tried them last year with 3 really early tomato plants I started specifically to experiment with. While they survived a good bit of frosty weather, in the end the plants I had started weeks later and planted out a month after the first ones when the weather had warmed quickly caught up to the wall-o-water ones and all the tomatoes pretty much bloomed & set fruit at the same time & rate. So my conclusion is that it was satisfying to my eager gardener's soul to be out planting early, but it really made no difference in overall plant performance. I have found the same to be true with early plantings of such things as peas and salad crops, too. Early plantings may survive, but later plantings quickly catch up and may even surpass earlier ones that have been stressed by the weather.

Tara, I did make mine in various sizes so I could nest them. To nest them, you need for the smaller ones to be 6" smaller in diameter so they easily nest inside the larger ones. It has been a long time since I made mine, and I am not sure I remember the exact lengths of the pieces before I formed them into circular cages, but if the largest was 72", then the next one was 66" and the next one 60" and the next one 54". It makes storage a lot easier. I match the larger cages to larger varieties and the smaller cages to smaller varieties. I have them in 4 or 5 diameters so I can nest a bunch of them to store them. I use the smallest size for pepper plants because my pepper plants often are so heavy by midsummer that they just flat fall over on the ground if they aren't caged or staked. I have used everything on earth to stake tomato cages. My favorite stakes are green metal t-posts, but they have gotten a lot more expensive over the last 10 or 12 years. I have some of them that I use that are 8' tall and some that are 6' tall. I sometimes use the little ones that I guess probably are 3' tall, though I only use them with smaller plants. I've also used grade stakes that are 2', 3' or 4' tall, although the ones that are 4' tall have become hard to find. You also can use electrical conduit, sturdy bamboo, or rebar. Rebar is pricey, but I also use it to hold down the edges of floating row cover in winter and spring, so it is multipurpose. I have a friend who makes his own stakes from cedar limbs he cuts from cedar trees when he is clearing them out of his pasture. The cedar limbs last a few years. He cuts a tapered 'v' shape at the bottom so they are easier to hammer into the ground than a limb that is cut flat across the bottom. I've used cedar cut that way for fence posts before and they lasted about 8-10 years and some have lasted 14 years without having to be replaced. Dawn

well you must be a good gardener since they are growing so well! Your spacing sounds good for indeterminate plants - they need some breathing space. I have not used the texas cages so I cannot comment on that. But the 18 sounds good compared to 24 so you might get better air circulation between the cages. The tomato forum on gardenweb has tons of thread on tomato supports. I made mine from concrete wire mesh that is 5 feet high, and the diameter is about 20 inches. Last few years there were two staked side by side on the north side of a few of my 4'x4' boxes (shorter veggies to the south of the tomatoes so that the tomatoes would get more light. There was some blight and tomato speck last year so I rotated the tomatoes out of the SFG boxes into a different part of the garden. One tip you will learn in growing tomatoes is that it is good to get any stakes and cages in at the time of planting so you do not disturb the roots later with the stake. Plus it can be hard to get cages around plants that have grown larger. :) Rachel