If you live in an area with plenty of trees you are blessed with adequate building materials for trellises and posts. They may be rustic in appearance but they can function pretty good. Today I'll show you my new trellis for my sugar snap peas. It's made from 5 pieces of dead wood that fell from our tulip poplar tree. Every now and then it drops a branch and some of them can be quite sizable. I took each of the five pieces and cut them to suitable sizes. One to cross above the peas, two for post supports, and two more for extra support at an angle. I stripped them of bark, which had mostly separated already.
I attached the pieces together using deck screws I had from a previous project. I drilled the holes first before screwing because sometimes wood splits if you screw directly into it and I wanted to avoid that problem as much as possible.
Unless the posts were buried into the ground it would need some sort of extra support for stability so I attached two more pieces at diagonal angles. The trellis crosses the 4'x8' bed at a diagonal angle so each brace is facing the opposite direction of the other. I may need to add two more smaller pieces for extra stability later but so far the trellis has withstood heavy winds. Of course that could all change once the peas are growing all over them. More leaf mass means it will catch more wind if you catch my drift!
Here is the finished product minus the peas. Once the peas emerge I'll string twine from the top of the structure down to each pea plant and secure them together at the bottom of the trellis with one more line of twine. The peas can climb the string and where necessary I'll attach more twine to form a netting or maybe just tie a little loop for the peas to hang onto. The total cost to me was $0 since I had all the other materials on hand from other projects. I'll show it in action once there is some action to show. Of course you can fashion a trellis from the same materials for each individual plant and make a tripod or whatever shape your imagination comes up with and mother nature provides!
Labels: Gardening Projects, how to garden on a budget, vegetable garden
Unless the posts were buried into the ground it would need some sort of extra support for stability so I attached two more pieces at diagonal angles. The trellis crosses the 4'x8' bed at a diagonal angle so each brace is facing the opposite direction of the other. I may need to add two more smaller pieces for extra stability later but so far the trellis has withstood heavy winds. Of course that could all change once the peas are growing all over them. More leaf mass means it will catch more wind if you catch my drift!