When I visited the Ocala area earlier this week, I stopped in at some friends of friends to see their gardens.
There I saw a cattle panel trellis system I really liked, as it added height without costing more.
It’s just T-posts and cattle panels, but the panels are about 18″ above the ground, bringing them up to almost 6′ of total growing space, which is perfect for indeterminate tomatoes, yams and pole beans.
My normal method inside the Grocery Row Gardens is to cut them in half and go way up, like this:
But for longer rows that don’t have trees interspersed in the mix, I like this other method of putting them higher long-ways. Just a simple change, but it really creates more vertical space for vigorous growers.
You can have greener thumbs by this weekend!
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About 1975 my dad bought several panels of remesh – it is a welded wire grid like the cattle panels, but lighter gauge made to reinforce concrete slabs. He cut them in half and bent them into cylinders to use as tomato cages.
One I gave away, one I fell over in the brush one night and squashed flat, and the rest I am still using
I hope you get as good wear out of your cattle panel trellises!
My father-in-law has been using the same set up for decades. He spot welded the cylinders of remesh to t-posts which are driven into the ground and keeps them in place.
That is a common-sense hack that never occurred to me. But then a bit tricky for a solo gardener. Not impossible, but tricky.
Yes – harder to do alone. I would probably put a 5-gallon bucket or two up as stands and put it on those next to the T-posts, then zip-tie it and take away the buckets. I do something like that to put up shelving when I am working solo.
I use four cattle panels… two straight panels, 18″ off the ground supported by T-posts. The other two are bent and installed vertically with both ends supported by T-posts. I have pole beans on both ends of one and two kinds of cucumbers on the ends of the other.
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