Our 1st Veggie Garden - Week 2 - Creative Trellising

The kids kicked back all afternoon just watching 

Another lovely Saturday in the yard with my hubby.  We planted the veggies last week and gave them a week to recover from the trauma of being transplanted and get their roots stretched out.  This week was time to cage/stake/trellis the tomato, cucumber and zucchini.

This morning as we were getting ready to go shopping, I thought we would try something first.  We have a tree that needed some branches trimmed because they were getting too close to the electric wires, so I thought maybe we could make a trellis.  It would save us a good chunk of change while also recycling the tree branches from our Maple Tree.

Tree that needed pruning

We stripped the branches we cut off the tree

We used branches that had a "tripod"
look to them for the corners to add stability

We used "forked" branches in the corners & center.
Then used garden twine latch the cross branches.

View of trellis from other side

We used veggie ribbon to tie veggies into place

That covered the tomatoes, but we still had cucumber and zucchini.  For that I had picked up some nylon netting earlier in the week to run from the garden wall to the fence.

The theory is, that while the plants grow, when they are ready for harvesting they will hang down from the netting and all we'll have to do is pluck it out of the air.  No soil contact with the fruit so no soil born pests or diseases.  Don't know if it will work that way, but I'll post an update.

Here is my nylon net trellis

We used the veggie ribbon again to
guide the cucumbers up their new trellis

There are 12 zucchini flowers are 3 cumber flowers in the first week.  Looks like we are off to a good start.

Cucumber flowers

Zucchini flowers