How to Build Vegetable Garden Cages

If you want to maximize your garden space, use garden cages for tomatoes, pole beans, sweet peas, cucumbers and other vegetables to help them grow vertically. Cages make it easier to reach the plants for tending and harvesting, and they keep plants off the ground and drier, reducing the chance of disease. Although you can purchase prefabricated garden cages at nurseries and home improvement centers, save money by making your own out of concrete reinforcing mesh screen.

Concrete reinforcing mesh screen
Wire cutters
Wire pliers

Instructions

- 1
  Snip a piece of concrete reinforcing mesh to a length of 4 feet, using wire cutters. As the mesh is 5-feet wide, your piece of mesh should be 4-by-5 feet. One of the 5-foot sides should have a row of unattached, 6-inch wires sticking out perpendicular to the side. Make the other 5-foot side a border of wire running the entire length of the side with no wires sticking out.
- 2
  Bend the end of each 6-inch wire that sticks out on the 5-foot side into a small hook, using wire pliers. The hook should be about as big as the circumference of your index finger. All the hooks should bend in the same direction.
- 3
  Curl the straight, 5-foot side of the mesh into a cylinder opposite the direction of the hooks on the other side. When it reaches the row of hooks, put the wire up and over them to latch the mesh so it holds its cylindrical shape.
- 4
  Stand the cylinder on end and adjust it so the top and bottom are level. Crimp each hook around the wire with the wire pliers. Your garden cage is finished.
- 5
  Snip off the last wire running around one end of the cylinder to make a round row of spikes. This is the bottom of the garden cage. Push the spikes into the soil around the plant to anchor the cage.
- 6
  Repeat steps 2 through 6 to make as many garden cages as you like.

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