Garden Trellis Design and Construction

Enlarge Image Image Gallery This V configuration trellis seems to be thriving in a Utah suburb. In limited space, trellising will get your garden growing up, saving you precious room in tight spaces. Paul Gardener

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My family loves fresh vegetables from our garden. Whether it’s a cold cucumber salad, sweet tomato sandwich or side of green beans steamed just right, we enjoy the heck out of it. As our garden has grown to suit our increasing needs, we’ve been faced with a consistent problem: either we give up the quarter-acre suburban yard, or we find a better way of growing. We chose the latter.

If you’ve grown green beans in a small garden, you’ll probably agree that pole bean varieties help optimize your production within a given patch of ground. The downside is that without the advantage of 40-foot-long rows, it’s challenging to grow a lot of pole beans without bunching them together in a small area. Bunching works fine for growing beans, but it’s not easy to harvest the inside of that monster tangle of vines.

Let’s say you’ve worked out a great method for growing your beans. What about your cucumbers? Do you let them run around on the ground? They’ll grow fine that way, of course, but from my experience you’ll be stumbling over them by mid-July.

Perhaps tomatoes are your weakness? You plant your single-harvest canning tomatoes in those wonderful wire cages, just like your grandpa always did, and they work great, but your summer-long indeterminate plants just keep growing. They fall all over themselves, get blown over by the wind, and you can’t get to those perfect tomatoes in the middle no matter how hard you try.

That’s where I found myself, struggling with all the cages, strings and vines that I couldn’t seem to get coordinated. What worked for one plant wouldn’t work for another, so I had to keep re-engineering solutions every time I rotated my crops. The trellising system that I came up with to solve this problem was initially planned just for green beans, but in time I came to see that it was suitable for many crops. 

A ‘square in the air’

The trellis frame that I built was designed to fit my raised bed gardens, which are 4 feet by 6 feet, but the frame could be made to fit almost any size beds, raised or not. By having the frame on the outside of the garden beds, you have the ability to modify the way the trellising is laid out, which in turn lets you control which plants are grown where. Best of all, you can change the layout every year without needing to rebuild the whole system.

To build the trellis frames on my raised beds, I started with eight 8-foot 2-by-2s. I cut the boards to the following: four 6-foot lengths, three 6-foot-3-inch lengths and two 4-foot lengths. For fasteners, I used 2.5-inch and 1-inch deck screws. You’ll need to decide if you want to strengthen the corners with triangles cut from scrap plywood or specialty metal brackets designed for joining three boards in a corner.

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