The veggie garden 2010-Part 3 (Trellises)

Our trellises and support systems in 2009 were pretty basic compared to the ones we put up this year. (Read about the 2009 trellis system here)

Our support structure for the Bush Beans was made from a #8 or #10 gauge steel ladder that is use as a stucco/concrete wall form. We spray painted it with rust proof paint, put two together and strung them around to form our very own Quick-Tee-Pee!

.....they are held together with some degradable twine.

Our other trellises for the climbers were built out of 7 ft tall 2x4 's bolted to the sides of the planter bed with 1/2"x5" Galvainzed lag screws

To give it added structural support, we put in a 2x4 across at the top using hanger boxes which make it a lot more convenient.

We then tried a number of variations on putting up the actual trellis. Our first attempt was pulled together using "C hooks" with the degradable twine going through the hooks. These aren't quite sturdy and tend to sag quite a bit. Moreover galvanized "c hooks" were tough to find.

So the next trellis that we put up was using #16 gauge aluminium wires threaded through eye hooks with a tension control mechanism (Hook and an eye) on the end.

Fortuitously this structure was in the bed the Opo Squash was in and it turned out to be good. But getting it set up was a herculean task. And I am assuming that at the end of the season it will be a bigger pain to clean things up. If it was just our degradable twine, I could cut it at a number of places and yank the whole thing and put it in our composter.

So we threaded the twine through the eyelets to create our other trellises

The Tomatoes have the Cadillac of the support systems, the Texas Tomato cages. Now that I see them growing, I doubt if anything else would have stood a chance. Though our home-made cages from last year are good, they are probably not a match for our massive Tomato plants from this year.

The smaller varieties of Tomatoes are housed in the cages from last year and the Tomatillos are housed in the store bought Tomato cages we bought in 2008 when we knew nothing about growing vegetables. You can see that the Tomatillo's have completely overgrown the cage and are also falling down.

One of our Tomato varieties (and I am guessing they are the Cherry Tomatoes) have been growing like crazy. They have outgrown the Texas Tomato cage. The Texas Tomato Cage is 6 ft tall, so this Tomato plant is about 8 ft tall at least.

There are 3 cages in this bed, but the plant on the farthest left has taken over most of the air space of the one in the middle.

Also there supposedly is a 2 ft walkway between these 2 beds that currently does not exist.

For the Eggplants we cut the same concrete form work structure used for the bush beans into 2 feet lengths and supported each plant to it using our twine

And of all...the Cucumbers got the short end of the stick. They are in our beds from last year with a wimpy trellis that was put together using some 2x2 lumber and tomato cage wire mesh.