If your garden is keeping up with Studio 5’s, it’s lush, green and growing away! But now it’s time to “grow up” – as in vertically!
Emily Saddler from the Jordan Valley Home & Garden Club shows us how to maximize space with minimum effort.
What do you do with all your plant growth in a small box? Well, you create opportunities for the plants to grow up (as in upward). Many garden vegetables will do fabulously when allowed to creep up trellises. There are many different ways to create upward mobility, we’ll highlight a very simple method.
Simple Garden Box Trellis
MATERIALS:
2 x 2 Redwood pieces which have been pre-cut for railing balusters (available at big box retailers).
Nylon netting- preferably the type with 4″ holes but wire mesh can work too.
Drill
Hand-held Stapler
Milk Paint (if you’ve painted your veggie boxes as we did in the first segment of this series).
It’s pretty simple to construct a trellis that can be mounted on the side of your garden box. Simply follow the steps below:
This project was made extra- easy through the use of pre-fabricated 2 x 2 Redwood Balustrade pieces (railing). The pieces were already beveled on the edges and mitered on the ends. We only had to cut them to the right lengths to fit our space. The angled piece that we cut off the top of the side pieces we used to help support the upper piece so very little materials went to waste. We painted the trellis pieces with the same Milk Paint we used on the original box.
There are several options to use for the trellis cross pieces. Since the box we’re showing is small and the trellis will support lighter-weight vine crops (squash and cucumber), we opted for a simple netting. The netting should be stapled to the frame then trimmed to fit. A quick and inexpensive solution!
To support larger crops or in larger beds, you can go with a simple wire mesh that is attached to sturdy poles. The example below can be seen at Conservation Garden Park {link http://conservationgardenpark.org/}. The trellises shown are more than 5 feet tall!
I have taken advantage of several different kinds of trellises within my own home garden. Okay, so my own garden doesn’t contain perfectly matched trellises and boxes but it’s filled with tasty goodness and that’s the most important thing!
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