No law says you have to stake or cage plants. Many people just let them sprawl on the ground. You will lose more tomatoes to disease, rot, insects, and sun scald if you let them sprawl, but even if you lose half your crop you still may have enough. Plus you don't have the cost of cages and the work of constantly checking your plants to keep them inside the cages, often breaking off branches while trying to get them back inside the cage. And a sprawling plant will produce more tomatoes, so even if you lose half of them, you may still have more than you can use.

ncbg,

Just a suggestion. Needs to be tied off on fence or ground stakes. Simple, cheap and easy to do.

Aloha

You might want to give florida weave a try. That's what I use and it works well. Link below to a video explaining how it's done.
Contrary to the statement above, sprawling tomatoes do not produce more fruit IME.

Here is a link that might be useful: Florida weave

(Contrary to the statement above, sprawling tomatoes do not produce more fruit IME )

thats not what californian said.

I plan to use wood stakes. I am a newbie and I planted too many seedlings so I may let some sprawl on the ground and the rest will be caged or staked. (or both)

Karen

I did some counting last year (mid August) between caged and staked plants. On the caged plants the main stem and its forks produced half of the plant's fruit (5-6 suckers had the other half). On the same variety, staked and pruned to the main stem and its forks (2-4 vines) relatively more fruit were produced than the caged plants (example: caged plant stem may have had 10 fruits while the staked plant had 12 fruits) therfore, in my garden two staked-pruned plants would outproduce one caged plant. This held for the big beefsteaks, it may be different for smaller fruited varieties.

I don't really stake or cage. Not exactly true. I put a stake at each plant and then build a trellis around the stakes. I then provide supports for the vines. I tie the vines that are not in good places to rest on the supports and train them to the supports. This trellis is not complete. There are still two more levels of supports to build but I think you will get the idea.

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PVC cages are what I do and have done for years.

Like this:

Follow the link for more information!

Here is a link that might be useful:

I use cages, as they are the least amount of work. Specifically, I use the Texas Tomato cages and will never use anything else, personally.

While they are expensive, they are worth it - provided you plan on growing a fair number of plants for years and years - they will last much longer than most improvised cages, they store very well (they fold flat).

As far as staking goes, I've tried that for many years, thinking it was the cheapest / only option... For the big indeterminates it was a nightmare. You either needed to prune / tie like crazy, reducing yield and spending lots of time, or the plants would be essentially sprawling in a very short amount of time.

As far as CRW cages and PVC cages, the materials do still cost money and my understanding is that they only generally last a few seasons at best. The big issue I have is that I don't have the room to store those types of cages. I have a fair amount of land, but not enough that I can leave a pile of cages in the back of my yard and not hear about it from the neighbors.

Florida weave is a good middle ground alternative for training plants. It's still a little bit of work since you need to buy / install posts and run twine regularly, but it's much better than traditional staking.

As I said, though, I prefer cages to everything I've done so far, but to each his own. The idea that I can re-use and easily store my cages for a decade or more is very appealing to me since I plan to have a garden as long as I have the physical ability to do so.

I've used my PVC cages for at least 15 years now with no
replacements needed. They aren't glued and can be broken
down into their components. Very little storage needed.
I have four 5 gal buckets that hold all the connectors
for 15 cages and can store the straight pieces in a very
small area.

On those PVC cages, do you do any pruning? Also, it looks like I see ties in there. Do you have to tie them off too? Also, how do they anchor into the ground. Just curious.

I have no protection from wind and get a fair amount of it, the TTCs are the only cages I've seen that stand up against it without additional anchoring when the plants are 6'+ tall and fully loaded.

Yes, I prune to 4 main leaders, one for each upright.

Yes, those are ties. It keeps them from falling. There's
not that many ties, about 4 per upright.

They're not anchored to the ground, but pounded down about
a foot. Never had a problem with winds since they're a
bit flexible and sway with the wind.

A few years ago, one other poster (can't find the post)
reported that my PVC cage held up the best in tropical
storm conditions. And when I say tropical storm, it
really mean an official tropical storm. It was the
remnants of a hurricane. Really strong winds.

Hope this helps.

the time to acquire staking/caging was probably 2 weeks ago