Well let me say that 5 feet of trellis isn't enough...If you can fix the cattle panel to the fence and extend the trellis, I would do that...I have a 6 foot fence that I use and my beans were climbing into the sky from there...at one spot they were 6 feet into a tree...They say you shouldn't have your trellis any higher than you can reach...I just took the tendrils and started them down instead of up...but I wished that my fence was a bit higher....but I couldn't have reached the beans...as it was, at the end of the season, I pulled the vines out of the tree and picked dry beans.

This isn't my idea. I first read about it on the internet and then seen it in action at a friends garden. She took the cattle panel and bent it into an arch. Plant your beans at the bases and walk through the tunnel and pick your beans.

A good rule is "high as you can reach". Pole beans will grow that tall and more. When they grow off the top of the trellis the tops will flop over, but that's OK.

Jim

Another approach is to clip off the tops of the vines when they reach the top of your trellis, whatever its height. I was reminded of this today while perusing the pole bean section of Fearing Burr's 1885 book, Field and Garden Vegetables of America, although his reason for doing this is a little different.

He says, "The maturity of some of the later sorts will be somewhat facilitated by cutting or nipping off the leading runners when they have attained a height of four or five feet."

I think I will try that to speed up some of my late maturing varieties, as well as to use shorter poles.

Jim

Do you put your trellis in north to south direction or east to west? Which is better?

I had been using 6' round cages I contructed for pole beans. This year, these will be used for vining snap peas. For my pole beans, I am buying 52"x16' cattle panels made of 4 gauge galvenized metal. I plan on cutting these in half and using each 52"x8' panel for one variety of pole beans. They will be staked with two 7' heavy duty metal T-posts.