looks beautiful and shady. wish i was under there now. it's a hundred plus where i am. did you start doing that for space, or for fun or ?

For space - I just hang out on this board for kicks. We're wannabe urban homesteaders on a normal-sized city lot about 5 minutes from downtown Dallas. I've managed to squeeze 8 raised bed gardens into the yard so far, we've got mostly edible landscaping, and I'm about to build a fence with alternating 6' wood panels and framed wire mesh (basically chicken wire!) so light still gets through, I have more vertical growing surface and my daughter's little hens don't escape to the front yard.

It should be over 100 here, but we're having a weird wet summer.

:)

when i lived in apartments years back, i grew apple trees that actually fruited in garbage cans, mop buckets and the like. you can do gardening anywhere you really want to, pretty much. that's the beauty of it.

I like that idea! What did you use for the tall posts? They look hollow so first I thought PVC but it's an unobtrusive shade of brown.

Suzanne

It's all PVC, but I painted it with the leftovers from our living room walls. The only thing I might do differently on another one would be to use metal poles for the double horizontal supports. The 1" PVC is fine for light stuff, but it bent a little when we moved big watermelons around to rest on them when we grew them vertically last year. I'm thinking of building another one in a different size to either put over a path or a small sitting area.

You did a great job, using it over a walk or sitting area is a good idea too. Ummmm, you won't grow watermelons on those will you? Maybe just small ones? ;-D

Suzanne

Wouldn't it be awesome to have a cold drink on a hot afternoon under a canopy of food? I think it'd be super cool. Or maybe a bunch of those Chinese red noodle beans hanging down.

i like your enthusiasm. i was that way when i first got grapes about ten years ago. just the concept of eventually growing them over the walkway and such.

what are the chinse red noodle beans? all i can think of are scarlet runner beans.

http://www.kitazawaseed.com/seed_263-11.html

I just wish we had more space. I grew up spending summers at my Grandparents' place in Mystic, CT, and every morning was spent eating raspberries and cream (from their bush) on their back porch under a bunch of grapes with their old tom cat.

One of these days... For now, we're stuck near cities because my husband's work is with large universities.

We've been experimenting with grapes for the past few years, but it's slow going. I planted something this year that took off like wildfire, but I'm unorganized and can't for the life of me remember what I planted. Guess we'll find out when it fruits.

lol. sounds like me. grapes take a few years to reach maturity. is mystic ct where the movie mystic pizza was? or just coincidence?

Yes - They had 3 acres, a hundred year old house and an old apple orchard at the highest point in Mystic. It was "discovered" in the early 90s, and by now their property has been broken up into 1-acre plots, the privacy and apple orchard is gone, and it's so expensive there that we'll probably never be there again. I wonder if the new people even know about the 300-year-old family cemetery hidden back in the woods behind their house!

I have a suggestion for garden structures. I was online looking at fencing stuff a while back and ran into Wedge-loc hardware. It's brackets and stuff that are made to hold T-posts together so that you can brace fence corners using just the T-posts, without digging post holes.*

I will be using these to put up a small, slanted roof to shelter our soon-to-arrive donkey, and later on build a big arbor out of T-posts and fence to let beans or clematis or something grow over, for shade.

This might be a nice possibility for vertical gardens, support for grapevines, etc. T posts are very strong and not terribly expensive - around $4-5 apiece for the six-foot ones.

I am not affiliated with the co. in any way, shape or form. I am not adding a link to their site, you can google it, and the hardware is also available online at some fencing companies. I don't wanna break any rules and link to a commercial site.

*If you use them to brace T-posts for fence corners/ends, be sure to follow their recommendations on using LOOOONG posts or they'll pull out with great force.