Busy spring in the backyard homestead!
Posted by: TammyI have been busy! I managed maybe a week off between maple sugaring season and the start of my spring planting. I spent a few evenings learning about proper crop rotation with my homesteading books and the latest “Mother Earth News” magazine. I made up a quick chart of my beds and decided that I needed to rotate some of my sugar snap peas and beans out of my vertical beds a bit. That left me with a bit of a conundrum. I needed the ability to get the beans and sugar snaps vertical without having a permanent vertical bed. A trellis was the obvious choice!
Have you seen how much a trellis can cost! OH MY GOSH! I fell in love with a metal/wood number but at $100 for each 6 foot tall by 1 1/2 foot wide section, I couldn’t tell if I wanted to laugh or just laugh! Many trellis would never meet the tall growing demands of beans and sugar snap peas, either. I went for a design I found in one of my gardening books!
I found large balls of jute twine at the local lot store for only $2.50 each. I got two. I was up to $5 in materials. After that, it was me, a friend and two pairs of clippers walking the woody parts of our property doing a little woodlot management! We found dozens and dozens of small pine that had to be cleared out. We began with about seven immature pines about 2″ in diameter for our main supports. We also cleared out a few pines about 1″ in diameter. We clipped off all of the branches and left them to recycle in the woods and dragged out our quarry.
Here is a picture of the near finished project so you can more easily visualize the job:
We laced the four main supports together with the twine, tee-pee style. Then we lashed four supports, horizontally about 5″ up from the bottom. Kitty corner between each of those is a small, short support to basically tie the main frame together. After that, I started adding what I had from the woods. I spent an hour collecting up fresh winter fallen branches and then just got creative. I angled them around and tried covering most of the space. I haven’t finished this one yet. I wanted to get it in place in the bed that I wanted it in before finishing. This bed was my cold frame bed and you can see my wintered over spinach under the trellis.
If you don’t have a supply of wood from a woodlot, you could easily do this project with inexpensive, store-bought wood. Go for all straight, 1″ doweling or something to that extent. My entire project will cost me my time, $5 for jute and extra coffee for the day my friend helped me prowl the woods for my materials.
So, the sky is the limit when you’re limited in garden space (go vertical!) and so can the cost for a trellis to get you there. But with a little time, twine and imagination, you can bring the cost of the trellis down to earth!
August 28th, 2010 at 7:28 am
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