Trellis Mania

[cleo88]

This year, my husband and I designed (and he built) a new trellis system. I plan to stain the wood but other than that, we're done.

As you can somewhat see from the photos, the concept is 3'x6' panels that sit in a foot of PVC pipe embedded in the ground. The piece of wood that goes into the ground is about 8 inches long and does not rest on the dirt - it's suspended a few inches above by the block screwed in at the bottom.

It remains to be seen if a foot of pipe is enough to keep it basically upright. The ground is really soft right now from all the rain we've had here in New England, so I'm not sure if they are going to start leaning. I can't decide if it would be a good idea to gang them together with twine - that would either make them stable or perhaps if one went down it would bring all the others with it!


I will still probably have to do some pruning so that I don't end up with a lot of main stems.

The big advantages of this system is that the PVC stays in the ground year round, so "installing" the trellises is just resting them in the pipes (assuming that frost heaves don't move the pipes too much) and taking them out is just as easy. They are flat so the store easily in shed, and the wood doesn't touch the soil anywhere so I hope it will last a while (assuming I get around to staining it).