Tomato Cages

After losing all my tomatoes on my allotment to tomato blight, yet again, I am reviewing everything I do and have come across "tomato cages, which can be used instead of stakes. I'd not heard of these before and wondered if anyone on this forum has any experence of them. I know this won't stop my tomato blight problem but I found it of interest and enything that might improve what I do is worth considering!

Regarding the blight, I went on holiday for ten days leaving all my beautiful tomatoes (32 plants, in all, would you believe) beginning to ripen and came back to a massacre!!!!

Several plants were just brown splodges on the ground and every single tomato, green or red, had blight (I think I found one ripe one without blight). Apparently, the day after I left for my holiday, the heavens opened and the rain came down for a couple of days, followed by the rapid spread of blight. I've been told that the only way to grow tomatoes on this allotment is with the use of chemicals but there aren't many left which we are legally allowed to use - I don't really want to use chemicals but if I have to start buying them who knows what has been used anyway? I think I'll growe mine in cans in future!

Anyway, I apologise for rambling on as my question is about tomato cages!

 

Bordeaux mixture is about the best thing to use. Or Copper Sulphate.:thumb:

 

FWIW, this year the toms by the sunny bit of the fence got really blighted. Perhaps I didn't use enough armillatox last year........ ?

Happily, there are 2 other small rows of about 8 plants which seem to have mostly got away with it (fingers crossed) these were about 4 feet, and 8 feet away from the blighted ones, and the ground hasn't been used for toms before. (there were potatoes there 2 years ago though)
The ones in the greenhouse cropped early, and were fine. There are still some new green toms on them, but the glut is over.

cheers,
Dave

 

Thanks for your reply but, I take it, none of you have used or seen tomato cages?

Regarding tomato blight, I shall use bordeaux mixture next year. I'm, also, thinking of making my own polytunnel on the allotment to have some control over the weather. I can, also, build the polytunnel to the size I want because I have all raised beds and the sizes of polytunnels for sale won't fit.

The problem was caused by us having too much very heavy rain in, just, a couple of days and that's when, it seems, my tomatoes got the blight.

The cage, by the way, is only out of interest. From what I've seen it could save ma a lot of time staking and tying up the tomato plants but from what pictures I've seen on the Internet, the cage doesn't look all that clever - that's why I was hoping someone else had tried one.

Thanks again.