Garden: DIY Garden Trellises and Support Structures
By Ruby Clancy
Our trellises for the GGG Garden’s adolescent tomato plants!
We all need support in life when we’re trying to grow, so why wouldn’t we afford our budding plants the same generosity? For a variety of plants, the use of support structures and trellises will garner a multitude of benefits. In this post, we’ll be going through some of these benefits while giving insight on how you can implement them in your own garden at a low cost.
A plant with no way to grow upwards will fall flat onto the ground. Take, for example, a sprawling cucumber plant reaching out all over the soil. Now, imagine you have limited garden space like we do at the Gauchos Go Green plot. A trellis provides a way for these plants to grow upwards instead of outwards, allowing us to maximize our space effectively. Further, when plants are able to stretch out and climb a structure like a trellis, they receive better air circulation and sunlight. This lowers the risk of disease and rot by keeping leaves off the ground and allowing them to properly dry after rain. Plus, the bees buzzing around the garden will appreciate the easier access for pollination.
Now that I’ve hopefully convinced you to look into some garden support structures, let’s talk about how to utilize them without breaking the bank. Of course you could go to a garden supply store and buy a trellis, but DIY-ing it is not as difficult as it may seem.
There are many ways to make a trellis at home, and some of them are as easy as repurposing something you may have thought to be trash. For example, take anything you can find with rails on it–like the side of an old crib–and you’ve almost got yourself a trellis. All you need to do is pound 2 stakes into the ground (crib’s width apart), and screw each side of the crib base to the stakes. Link to more articulate instructions. Once your plants start creeping up the sides and flourishing, you can relish in the magic of cost free gardening (and recycling).
Taking a different route, you can get a little handier and make a trellis from scratch. You’ll need wood strips cut to your dimensions, some basic tools, screws, and gravel. Making your design, you’ll want to arrange your wood in a grid like pattern, ensuring there is space for two posts on the bottom to be inserted into the ground. Then, insert two screws in each area where the wood strips intersect. To put the trellis in the ground, dig post holes at least 10 inches deep and fill each with a couple inches of gravel. Finally, put your trellis posts into the holes and fill with soil, tamping to ensure that the posts are secure.
As you can see, support structures are not difficult to make on your own, and they allow you to maximize your space while aiding in the health of your plants! Some of the best things to put at the base of a trellis are tomatoes, sugar-snap peas, and cucumbers, but a wide variety of plants will appreciate the support. So from now on, I urge you to help your plants stand tall.
