How tall are your trellis?

I am debating trellis heights for peas and cucumbers. The trellis will NOT be in sfg, but instead run along side them in the garden. Last year I installed a 15 foot long cattle panel trellis for the beans and they went gangbuster. This year I was going to put up another one until I realized that it would throw off the symmetry of my garden (pathetic, I know ). I was debating doing 15 foot cattle panels and just running them straight down the garden so it would be about 4 feet tall and 15 foot long--one for cucumbers and one for peas. Thoughts???? Will it be too short?

Drive some 6' tee posts on the ends and tie them up higher , then they will be off the ground and you will get some added elevation

milaneyjane wrote:I was debating doing 15 foot cattle panels and just running them straight down the garden so it would be about 4 feet tall and 15 foot long--one for cucumbers and one for peas. Thoughts???? Will it be too short?

It sounds perfect to me, but I am under 5' tall!

Based on my experiences with crack-cucumbers last season ..... thats about 4' too short ...LOL

But 8' was about 4' too short too ..... so make sure you talk to rampicante-lady for some creative trellis techniques.


I see a lot of "back-and-forth/up-and-down" trellising in your future

Acara----what kind of cucumber did you plant? That is my other dilema. I want to make lots of pickles and would like a good yielding variety. 8 foot vines---woohoo!

Hahahahaha! Some plants will grow however tall your trellis is and still beg for more. I trained the rampicante up, and down, and back up again, a 6.5 foot trellis, and from there it took over my entire yard with 280+ft of vine and tried hard to eat my house.

Peas don't seem to need a whole lot of height unless they are a long-vining type like Telegraph. (Which I have not grown, but, I'm just sayin'... look at the name. Telegraph pole. You know what those are??)

There are bush cukes and vining cukes. I grew vining cukes last year and they laughed at the 4-ft cage I started them in, clambered partway up the 10-ft amaranth, leaped to the top of a trellis and duked it out the pole beans. They were just starting to tangle with the rampicante (vine traverse approx 6.5 feet up and at least 5 feet over) when cuke beetle disease finally killed them. YMMV.

It's funny because unless you have used a trellis for a certain plant, you kind of forget what you are dealing with. My cucumber and vine plants have always wandered the garden and I have never really paid attention to just how long they are, except for the watermelon. Ideally I should be looking at 6 feet I guess minimum unless I want to do another arch trellis----and ruin the garden symmetry.

The nice part about 6-ft-ish (not a word, sorry) trellises is, the leftover 4-ft conduit is teh awesomeness for anchoring a compost pile surround. Which I hope to do here shortly....

The Lowes by me sells 5' lengths of conduit, so I just use 3 of those and cut off a bit less than a foot from the top bar...

milaneyjane wrote:Acara----what kind of cucumber did you plant? That is my other dilema. I want to make lots of pickles and would like a good yielding variety. 8 foot vines---woohoo!

I did Burpless, but they say those aren't very good for making pickles.

I dunno .... tasted pretty yummy to me.

I'm usually a "tomato only" peep & it was my first time growing cukes ..... so I'm probably the wrong person to be offering suggestions on what to grow

milaneyjane wrote: Ideally I should be looking at 6 feet I guess minimum unless I want to do another arch trellis----and ruin the garden symmetry.

You know you're a SFG if the first answer to this dilemma which pops into your head is...then build another box to "resymmetrize" the garden.

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