Mommie_rose,

"I recently moved to a new home (still renting, meaning I can't plant into the ground)..."

We are currently living with my daughter and son-in-law, so we can make a large garden here. But over the years, we have been renters at several places. We have been fortunate because every one of our landlords said "Yes" when we asked for permission to make a small garden. Just an idea.

Is there any sort of clothesline on your concrete porch area? If so, you could tie lengths of heavy string from it and tie your tomato vines to the string. Peas and cucumbers have tendrils and will grasp a hanging string with little or no "training".

There are small "ready made" trellises at home stores and garden centers and your 5-gallon buckets, when filled with potting medium, might be stable enough to permit those to be inserted in them.

Or perhaps you could build something of your own design with inexpensive materials.

MM

Thanks, MM, for the input. There is no clothesline in the area. I'm thinking about getting some ready made trellises, but I got two last year for my two containers of peas, and the peas outgrew the trellises. Last year was a lot easier, as we were living in an apartment with a balcony, so I could just train my plants to go on the railing. I was hoping to design my own inexpensive trellis, as you suggested, but I don't know where to start. What materials would be best? What would be the best design? I don't have my containers set up yet, so I could plan their arrangement around the trellis, really.

Earthboxes with concrete-reinforcing-wire trellises...the wire was bent into a box that just fit into the rim of the container. Good for maters, vining squash, beas, beans....

Plot_thickens,

You might want to leave one side open on the square re-mesh trellis. I trained some things up on large 2½-foot diameter re-mesh tomato cages, using them as cylindrical trellises, and discovered that it is hard to harvest the stuff that hangs inside the closed trellis. I had icebox watermelons that were just too large to get through the 6-inch squares of the re-mesh, so when it came time to pick them, I had to tediously move them up to the top of the cylinder, one square at a time. It was a tricky two-handed operation. I had the same problem harvesting Costata Romanesco vining Zucchini squash.

This year I will be opening up some of my tomato cage trellises to allow access to the inside. Except for the ones that are still used as tomato cages.

MM

Check this out:

http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/load/tomato/msg061445235865.html

dcarch

You might try tomato cages. However I have found that tomato cages tend to lose their grip in the loose soil used for containers and start to fall over under the weight of the fruit.

What has worked for me is to attach 3 vertical poles to the outside of a plastic 5-Gallon paint bucket. For this I used bamboo, it is cheap and very strong. Then wrap the poles horizontally as the plants grow with whatever is convenient. String or twisted sheets of cloth work well.

To attach the vertical poles to the bucket I first twist screw-eyes into the container. One at the bottom and another near the top. You can do this by hand. Screw eyes are like screws but the top has no flat surface into which one would insert a screwdriver. Instead the top is looped creating an eye into which you can insert the bamboo.

This photo might help explain

I was cleaning out a basement and found an old crib. I took it to use as a trellis and hopefully it will work.

What a great idea for container growing! Thanks for the suggestion, am on my way out now to get some bamboo poles and eye screws for my 5 gallon buckets. Have used cable ties through holes in the buckets to attach poles in the past but this is MUCH easier.

If you have plenty of 5 gallon buckets (they are pretty cheap at Home Depot) you can fill 2 of them with concrete and put a 7 foot fence post in each, then buy nylon netting for between the posts.