hudydog, I don't need a great lot of pole bean plants because I dedicated a 4 x 4 raised bed just to bush and a few pole beans. I pounded in a 4 ft piece of rebar immediately outside the bed, then put a 7 ft. piece of pvc over it, with 9 long pieces of twine tied to the top. I tied each string to a peg at ground level placed evenly across the 4 ft. area. Planted a pole bean on each side of the peg. In other years, with larger gardens, I have planted pegs all around the pvc pipe and that makes a teepee. This is sort of a quarter-teepee. I planted the row of beans so they went north/south. Held up fine to our occasional southwest high winds, as the pvc pipe flexed a little, but never enough to rip the plants out. Worked great. Here's a photo of my bean bed. Sunny

Pole beans will do well on a trellis, that's the only way I grow them. They will twine around almost any vertical support, including fencing; but some varieties don't seem to like artificial supports, such as plastic or galvanized metal. Rusted metal (such as old fencing, or concrete remesh) works great. Most of my trellises are strings run horizontally between fence poles, with vertical strings run between top & bottom bars. The verticals wrap around the horizontals on the way down. Takes some time to tie them each year, but I can build them in any length, and don't need to worry about storing lengths of fencing. Baler twine is cheap but strong, and you can just burn it vines & all at year's end. Ditto Anney's comment on "Fortex". It acts like a cowpea, until it gets up a ways, sending out long runners almost horizontally. My favorite pole snap bean, but requires some training initially.

Johnny's sells two kinds of white plastic netting with about 6-inch large openings: Trellinet Hortonova I've used the 79-inch wide netting for pole-bean trellis and have been very pleased with its performance. The 79 inches fit the height of my trellis.

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