Never tried an obelisk, but I think I finally found my own solution for supporting cukes in the potager. For years I had used stakes, bamboo, string, tomato cages, netting, etc. etc. and never found a solution that I liked. This year, while browsing around at one of those unfinished furniture stores (I think it's called Mill Stores), I noticed they were selling lattices on sale. Nothing fancy, just a wooden lattice about 2-feet wide and 6-feet tall, and they were on sale for $4 each. I bought 2 of them, leaned them against one another to form an A-frame and secured it with twine at the top. It looks great, it was cheap, and works very well. I have about 5 plants climbing through it now. If I remember, I'll take some pictures tonight.

-Diggity

Diggity - do you think your lattice solution would hold up to melons (watermelons & cantaloupe) & pumpkins? I'm rapidly running out of space & need a more efficient means of growing these next season.

Thanks in advance!
Ilsa

Each year I grow more of my veggies on a trellis. My garden is 60 x 120 feet but I use the trellis for more plants per space. My favorite is heavy woven wire on 9 or 10 foot (2 to 3 feet into soil) posts, but my 8 foot steel posts do fine. I mostly use any kind of salvage I find. A local commercial grower uses tobacco sticks to hold up 4 foot woven wire.
I grow on trellis: watermelon, trombone Zuccina (a butter cup squash), brambles, cucumber, pole beans, Scarlet runner beans, pumpkins, tomatoes. and I hope to add more.

Hmmm - that is why I like these forums so much - maybe a nice metal trellis would fit in with my yard and provide more space than an obelisk for the cucumbers - I also grow tomatoes which I think would do quite well in an obelisk - kind of like a big tomato cage

fern

I just happened upon this thread and think we have the same cottage garden/potager vision. I used a 6-foot black metal trellis for my cuke vines the past two years and it worked just fine. Your enthusiastic cukes will probably grow up one side, down the other and then venture outward, so you'll have to be ready to deal with that. I had a tomato plant that behaved similarly - up the support and back down, over the garden fence (I just had to let it go to see what it was up to) and into a large rhododendron, where it continued to produce, with strikingly odd effect.

Diane

I grow melons and cukes on the back fence. I do need to support the melons, though, as they break off before they're completely ripe.

I make a sling of old panty hose, and tie it like a hammock under the young fruit.