my five minute, $10 tomato trellis...

15 years ago

- three 10' 1/4 inch pieces of conduit @ $1.20 each (one cut in half for this trellis, but they can stretch 10 without a problem)

- two 1/2 inch elbows @ $2 each

-two five-foot length of plastic chicken fencing... maybe $1 or $2 (twenty-five foot roll for a few dollars)(i need to finish this trellis with a second row of fence.)

-a bunch of zip ties

i like tom's cattle fence, but i don't have the room to store it nor the will to tie it down to my truck... these conduits last forever and i can push them straight into the ground 10 feet down. (i'm fat and strong.) a seven foot tall, ten foot long trellis costs under ten bucks. i assembled this quick trellis for my tomatoes in about five minutes. at the end of the season, it disassembles into practically nothing.

the pea trellises in the background are made the same way, only instead of a top bar out of conduit, i drilled holes through the conduit and used long bolts and wingnuts to hold leftover 1-bys. a few staples with my heavy-duty stapler and that's it. when i realized how strongly the peas were growing (they're at 6 feet right now), i wove some bamboo into the fence to give the structure some more height.

mostly i don't even bother with trellises. instead, i thread three feet of heavy wire down the conduit and make a loop with the wire at the top of the conduit. (like a long question mark--the wire down the conduit secures it so it can hold the very heavy weight of my indeterminate tomatoes, which probably weigh 50 lbs by the height of the season.) i tie a piece of nylon twine to the loop at the top of the conduit, then jam the whole thing into the ground next to my tomato. i tie the twine loosely at the base of the tomato, and then wrap the twine around the tomato. as the plant grows, i just twist the twine loosely around the plant stem. i sucker the plant, but not too heavily.

these galvanized conduits are the most useful thing in my garden. they're cheap and last forever, easy to cut, and even bend easily.

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