Shop Products
Houzz Logo Print
wendywalker_gw

my first time going vertical

WendyWalker
10 years ago

My garden is fairly small, about 25ft square, and last year my tomatoes literally took over an entire corner, and the cukes another corner. It was impossible to get between the beds to harvest the veggies. I want to try going vertical this year, and have a few questions. I have no walls or tall fences near the garden so all trellises would be free-standing.

I'd like to do the style of trellis that arches over the path so you can simply pick the veggies from underneath. I've seen these done with a few different materials, with different size spaces. Ideally, a material would have spaces small enough to keep the plants growing on top without constantly having to reposition and tie them, but would allow the baby veggies to fall through and grow hanging underneath. Is this possible, or will the plants require tying no matter what? What size spaces work best?

I'm in MN, where the growing season is rather short, and right now I have 2 feet of snow on top of my garden, so I don't have high hopes for an early planting- the usual planting date here is Mother's Day weekend. Will the plants grow enough in this short summer to be worth doing arches, or am I better off with something shorter? Judging by last year my indeterminate tomatoes will get plenty big, but they were such a tangled mess I'm not sure how long they actually got.

Does it matter which direction the trellises are facing? The way my garden is laid out, the arches could go east/west or north/south. Will it matter which plants go on which side?

Comments (2)

Sponsored
Peabody Landscape Group
Average rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars8 Reviews
Franklin County's Reliable Landscape Design & Contracting