Thank you ladies!

I think I will try putting steaks at each end of the row and stringing them up.  Might use tposts.  We have

several of those laying about.

I've tried a lot of things.

When I had a place to store them, I made circular cages out of old garden fencing, or reinforcement wire, or any kind of rigid wire material I could get my hands on that had spaces big enough to get a hand through.  To my mind, these were the absolute best.  But then Hubs got to complaining they were in the way when they weren't being used.  Tried to flatten them out for storage but never could get them flat enough and then Hubs complained about them being dangerous, where I was trying to store them.

So then I tried two rows of stockwire (aka cattle panels, 12' long by 5' wide), staked in about 18" apart, with the tomatoes planted between them.  This worked ok and the panels stayed flat so during the off season we just put them up against the fence.  The only problems I had with this was that when a plant became sick and needed to be pulled out, it was hard to get it out without damaging the other plants.  Also if you want to interplant you have to have so many.

Then I saw tomato cages made out of PVC pipe.  These were terribly expensive to make, not so much because of the pipe, but all those little connector things.  And there's too much open space, the plants have to be tied pretty often or they sprawl out.  Easy to break down and store, though.

Now that I've moved where I have more land, I think I'll go back to the circular cages.  I don't have any kitchen help so when I'm canning I lose control of the garden, and don't get out there to tie as often as I need to.

I use the tomato cages for just about everything else.  They're great for pepper plants, to use in the iris bed when the flowers start to flop, to mark where you've planted tree seeds (tie some strips of something colorful on the cage if you don't want to find your mailman tangled up in it though), for pole beans, and, when laid on their sides, they make good deterrents for digging cats and short-cutting dogs. 

This year, for the indeterminate ones, I used 80" rebar pounded into the ground (like beeyourself's vampire stakes) and tied them every couple of days. They still got taller than the stakes! For the determinate varieties I use the heavy duty cages. Gotta really shove 'em in the ground to keep them from falling over. Those little flimsy ones laughingly called 'tomato cages', work pretty well for supporting eggplants. My neighbor uses concrete reinforcement wire bent into rounds, slightly graduated in size so they stack inside each other when not in use. I'd love to do that (no tying!), but don't have the storage space right now.