Bean Trellis Goes Up
June 7th, 2009 · No Comments · Posted in garden
Romano beans climbing their new trellis
It’s become an annual ritual, the raising of the trellises.
I fashioned them out of 1 1/2-inch PVC plumbing pipe, two eight-foot lengths joined together with a “T” fitting to run the length of a garden bed. At each end are 90-degree elbows. The “T” and the elbows connect to three legs, each eight feet long. I pound three metal stakes (actually pieces of metal electrical conduit) into the ground to act as supports for the legs. The PVC tubing simply fits over the stakes to hold the entire trellis in place.
I discovered that high winds could blow the trellis apart by collapsing the top frame in the middle, around the “T” joint. Eventually I experienced enough failures that I cemented the “T” in place so that the horizontal member will not bend in the middle. This means I have to find a place in the garage at the end of the season to store a 16-foot-long piece of PVC. But it’s worth it to be able to grow vegetables vertically in our urban kitchen garden here in the District of Columbia, about a mile from Michelle Obama’s garden at the White House.
I painted the PVC frame black to blend more readily into the background. Once the frame is in place, I anchor it at both ends with clothesline and tent stakes. Then,neart the bottom of the trellis, I string twine from one end to the other horizontally, and use this to anchor vertical strings corresponding to each climbing plant, such as the beans you see in the photo.
Pole beans are generally more productive than bush beans and they easily will climb 10 feet or more into the air, creating an impressive wall of green in the garden. This year we are focusing on green beans rather than shell beans. We do love lima beans and big, speckled Christmas beans–especially in our faux-cassoulet–but since we are no longer eating starchy carbohydrates, we’ve switched our entire production to an assortment of green beans. In the pole variety, we chose Kentucky Wonder and Romano beans.
As you can see, the bean plants eagerly wrap themselves around the vertical string to defy gravity. Growing beans vertically in the rear of the bed leaves plenty of room for planting other shorter vegetables in the remaining bed. In fact, the beans take only a marginal amount of space in a three-foot-wide bed otherwise packed to the gills with potato plants.
We have a second, identical trellis in another bed where we are training three different varieties of pickling cucumbers. Cucumbers send out tendrils for grabbing and climbing, making them another ideal candidate for creating a vertical wall of produce in the city. Two or three plants produce enough cucumbers for a family. We end up with pickles enough to supply friends, neighbors and extended family.
In fact, we still haven’t finished the pickles from last year.
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