The wire is rusty, don't worry. We leave our cages outside all the time. Some of them are getting to be about 13 years old and will be useful for 20+ more years. So it might seem expensive at first but the returns outweigh the initial cost. Once the legs are worn out you just cut off another horizontal wire to make new ones.

We tried several new methods this year and John said just the other day that he only wants the ones described above next year. He is tired of messing with other things. We ran out of cages because we now grow for so many families (27 this year) and grow far more toms that we have ever grown before. This year we had 170 tomato plants but he says we are buying lots of wire material next year. Anything else is just too inferior.

Happy Gardening,
Diane

I use the same technique as Diane and find it works very well. Just a couple of additional points. First, you will need to use some rebar wire to bind the concrete reinforcement grid into a tube shape as Diane suggested. Just be sure to have enough overlap in the tube so that the vertical pieces line up so you can twist the wire around them to tie the whole thing together.

I find that my tomato plants grow to about 7 or 8 feet, so I raise the height of the cages by attaching four 4 foot long pieces of 3/8" rebar to the bottom of each cage. I attach these "stilts" using the same rebar wire mentioned above and then hammer them into the ground. The advantages also include a much stronger anchor so the cages don't tip over. It also makes it much easier to weed around the bottom of the cages.

I have also used extra cages mounted horizontally on top of the vertical ones Stonehenge style.