How to Make Tomato Cages

Female: Oh here we are buying-- Male: So we are at the lumber yard, we are going to get our concrete reinforcing wire. This is the coolest lumber yard in the world. Female: Do you drive through? Male: You will drive through the lumber yard. Female: [Talking to the dogs] Male: Back to the show, this is a large lumber yard. And your lumber yard might not have this but this is called concrete reinforcing wire. It comes at five foot by 10 foot lengths. And they use it when you are pouring a sidewalk or something like that. But it is also perfect for making tomato cages. There are two different gauges of wire that it comes in. I think it comes in an eight gauge and this looks like it might be a 16 gauge. No, wait. Female: What is a gauge? Male: That is just like electrical wire has 10 and 12 gauge wire and 14 gauge wires; the same thing with wires to make other things. So these are five foot by 10 foot lengths and we are basically going to cut it in half. Female: Are you sure? Male: Yes, I have measured them. Female: It looks to me like you best have your tetanus shot before you work on there. Was it pre-rested? Male: If you are doing garden fork, you should always have your tetanus shot and which I had last year after stepping on a nail. Female: Is that me helping? Male: Yes that is you helping. Okay so we are back at the house. Lyn went to the barn and we are full of hotdogs now, thank you Willy’s Weiner Wagon. I have figured out the diameter of the cage. I look there are different trash cans and stuff and I found one that could have a nice diameter I thought would be good for tomatoes. And I measure the circumference and it is about five feet so it is perfect because this is a 10 foot long piece. So we are basically just going to cut it in half and then we will have two cages for each 10 foot piece we bought so that would be nice. So to cut this, I put down two 2 x 4s and then I centered where we are going to cut the wire right over the gap and between them. And we are going to try a couple--you could use bolt cutters to cut this. You really cannot use wire cutters because it is just too thick. I do not have a bolt cutter so I am going to use my hand grinder and see how well that works. So make sure you have your star wars shield on. I could go to a star wars convention with this. These are cheap like $12 at the store. And then I am going to use; this is our four inch grinder and it has a grinding wheel on it. If yours can put a cutting wheel on it, you can get small cutting wheels that go on these as well. And we are going to see what happens with this. It forms a shape like that and the barrel is too big. So I do not know what to do here. I have really not done this before so I am just going to try and turn this in on itself and see what happens. So we want to make it kind of coiled together. That takes some strength, around. I have figured out that I have made a couple of this now and I figured out a better way to do it. So, you need two different things. You will need; these are called lineman’s pliers. Female: Which ones? Male: The yellow ones. These are big pliers. And you will need; these are called channel locks. So here is what you are going to do, okay? Step one, after you have cut your thing here, you will take the end points and the middle point and you bend them over but you do it in a bit of an offset. In other words you do not bend this straight over. You bend it. See these little sharpie things. That is why I think that both cutters would be better. But instead of bending this straight over, we want to bend it at an angle kind of like that. So when you come to the middle one and you do the same thing, you bend this over to the side. That is a better word, bend it to the side. So you take that and you bend like that. Female: So not all of them, just the end ones and the middle ones. Male: Right the end ones and the middle one. Okay, now we do that on the other side so we flip this thing around. Female: Do not poke your eyes out. Male: Okay the hard part when you are trying to make this into