We normally use bamboo pole uprights with bamboo crosspieces and string woven up and down from top to bottom for our pole beans. Last year the whole setup started listing to one side, so we shored it up. This year the bamboo poles have been snapping off at ground level, and it's been a constant hassle to reinforce them. I know some people use metal stakes and cattle panels for their beans, and I'm sure that would work well, but I was hoping to find something more attractive since our garden is a potager-type with flowers and veggies mixed. Because we rotate our crops, it has to be movable. Any ideas?
Attractive Bean Fencing?
I purchase bean poles from Burpee. Hubby anchors them to the sides of our raised beds with nylon string and nails.
I put a bamboo cross-piece between two bean poles and run jute twine up-and-down for the beans to "run" up.
The beans cover the whole thing and look like a beautiful green "wall"
I'm at work so don't have a photo to show you.
Honeybee, this is what I've got going now. It's a solid wall of green and obviously more than the bamboo and string could support. The bamboo tripods in the back are my tomatoes:
This message was edited Jul 27, 2010 12:18 PM
You can see the way it looked before the beans grew up here. This is from last year; the bean fence is behind the tomato tripods here:
I copied a photo from my web page to show the bean tower
Honey, that doesn't look sturdy enough to withstand my vines. Did you see that solid wall? Lots more leaves than beans, though, unfortunately. We've had to shore up the bamboo with metal stakes just to get through the season.
You have a longer run than I do between uprights, but you have more string between the poles than I do.
greenhouse_gal - I'll have to send you an up-to-date photo this weekend - it really is very sturdy. That photo was taken in May (I think)
Okay, Honeybee. I may have planted too thickly, too, but this is the second year that this method has needed shoring up, so it's time to rethink things.
I think you just need more supports, like you have with your tomatoes. I've used that same system with tomatoes, wrapping jute twine around the tomato stalks to hold them up from the crosspoles. That would work with beans also.
For beans, I have used a bamboo trellis with no crosspoles that just has a jute net tied on it and that leans against the gutter over my patio. I tied two 7ft bamboo poles together to make each pole (about 10-12ft long, I guess). It works really well. It shades the patio, and the beans (or peas or cukes) hang down over the patio and so are easy to pick. If you don't have a patio like that, you could probably do it by making the poles good and long and leaning them against a house, like over a window you would like to shade. Then you just walk inside the triangle made by the bamboo poles and the house. It's nicer with a patio, though.
Paracelsus, maybe we also just need new bamboo poles; ours are several years old by now, and many of them were left outside in a pile all winter. How many poles do you use for a given length of row, and where do you get your jute netting? Our garden is across the driveway from the house, but I could use the adjacent garage roof for one year. Still, I rotate my crops so I really need something freestanding that I can move around.
My tomatoes are on tripods and I prune them to a single main stalk and tie them with those velcro strips. I love those because I can move them as the plant grows and reuse them year after year until they totally give up. I have grown beans on tripods in the past, but the last time I tried it they seemed very reluctant to climb them and I had to fiddle with them constantly. I think my poles were a little too smooth for them to grab.
I put my tomatoes on a kind of swingset system. Tripods at the ends and in various places in the middle, holding up a double bamboo crosspole, and then the jute cords hanging down from there that are wrapped around the main stalk as it grows. I saw this on a British site about growing tomatoes, tried it, and it is way easier than cages or anything. Velcro strips is a great idea! I have been using these bread-tie type things. They work okay but are not really reusable.
My bamboo poles are about three years old, but I store them under the patio roof in winter. I have definitely noticed they get more brittle when left outside. I got a whole bundle of 7ft poles from A.M. Leonard, and it was a good purchase.
For the bean/pea/cuke trellis against the patio roof, I have poles about every two feet. I tie two poles together so they are long enough to reach the patio roof gutter when rested at a slant. I got my jute netting from Gardener's Supply. It was expensive but I have been looking for that stuff for several years. Everyone has that crummy white plastic netting from China that is really hideous IMO and that lots of plants don't like to climb up it. I was so glad to find this jute netting again that I bought a couple of them:
http://www.gardeners.com/Biodegradable-Netting/FlowerGardening_Trellises,38-776,default,cp.html
My peas liked it just fine. Now the cukes will have a chance.
I got my bamboo poles from AM Leonard too, several years ago. They had the best price and the longest length, but I think I got 8-footers. Either that or the ones we cut ourselves from a friend's bamboo patch were 8', and the ones I bought were 7'. If storing them under a roof would be sufficient, we have an overhang off the garage, near the garden, that would work. DH likes to return them to the barn when we're done with them but it's a pain to get them back down the driveway to the garden then. So we didn't do anything last year and I think we paid for that sloth!
Thanks for the link from Gardener's Supply. That stuff looks good, and it would be a lot easier than zigzagging twine up and down the cross-pieces. Are you reusing your jute netting, or is that just for one season? My peas are done but I planted my cukes before they were finished producing. Anyway my peas are a bush variety so they wouldn't have needed netting. My beans tend to be a main season crop so I can't follow them with anything that would need support.
I just looked at the reviews for the jute fencing, and several people said that it was really hard to put up because of the way it was packaged, and that it didn't outlast wind storms. Have you found any of that to be a problem? I was going to order it and then I thought I'd wait to see what you said about those issues.
My tomato tripods are an idea I got from admiring French potagers. I grow French tomato varieties anyway so this makes them feel at home. They work really well for me. This was from last year:
Your garden looks wonderful. I wish mine looked half as planned and as neat.:)
The jute netting is kind of hard to put up, but IME any netting is. I asked my neighbor to help me. I just stretched it and allowed it to become assymetrical. The holes are more diamond-shaped on mine than square. Maybe that bothers some people, but it doesn't bother me. We've had some wind storms and it has not been affected at all. It has gotten rained on, no problem, and endured our ferocious heat and humidity this year, also no problem. This is the first year I have had it. I am going to try to just keep it on the poles at the end of the season and bundle the poles up and put them on the patio. I grew pole snap peas on it this spring, tore them down when they were done to make room for cukes, and the netting looks brand new. I was going to put pole beans on there too but I decided I had enough beans. Last year I had a black plastic net (and the year before that I had the white plastic net), and I found they were very difficult to handle and really hard to take down at the end of the year because they were full of junk and slippery. I got so fed up I threw them out. This, the worst that could happen is I get frustrated when I am taking it down and just cut it and put it in the compost. But I still have lots more. I like this stuff, not as much as the stuff you used to be able to get, which I think was made out of cotton (green fiber netting), but it's way better than plastic or metal, which was what I was going to try next.
Thanks for the feedback; I will order two rolls of it. My DH can help me put it up. I think my beans will far prefer the netting to the zigzag twine; the gaps are much larger with that technique, in many areas, than with the netting. I think we will like the look of that much more than the look of cattle panels. Next year I'll use three bamboo pole uprights per section as before, but place metal stakes between them to provide extra support. That plus the netting should do it. How do you attach your netting, by the way? I wonder
My garden doesn't look that nice this year; because of the heat it's gotten away from me and I think I just lost my last zucchini plant to SVBs, which is discouraging. I do plan it carefully because I rotate crops; I made up a template where I can pencil in types of veggies each year so I know what I had last season and where I can move things to next.
I just tie the netting to the poles about every 1-2 feet. I had a lot of those bread-tie things, so I used a bunch of those and then some lengths of jute cord (I buy a big huge spool, I use it so much). The jute seems to grab stuff good. I haven't had any problem with it slipping.
I've always wanted to have a potager or Victorian kitchen garden, but I don't really have a place for it. My landlady told me they do not want any vegetables in the front, regardless of how attractively they are arranged, and that is where the big blocks of sun are, so I have to just make do with what I can grow in my shady backyard. This year I decided to focus mostly on herbs instead of veggies because of that. I have peppers in big pots, and pickling cukes and snap peas on the trellis. One of these days I'll be a place where I can have the kind of garden I'd like.
We lived in rented houses for a few years before we got our own place, so I know what that's like. We had a nice garden in our first home but it was hard to have to leave it when we moved on. I hope there's a potager coming up quite soon in your future. We've been here for almost forty years now and we've enjoyed (almost) every minute of it.
Paracelsus ~ thanks for the recommendation and the link on the jute netting. I think it will be more serviceable than the plastic mesh I used last year.
The plastic became brittle at the end of the summer from sun/heat and was a toss.
I think the cattlepanel bean arbor is attractive when covered with beans but ugly in off season and a bear to disassemble, reassemble or relocate.
Interesting to hear about the possible downside of the cattle panels. I had thought of using 8' lengths, but that would be pretty awkward to put up and take down.
It sounds like the jute netting is only good for one year, but at least if it's a toss it's biodegradable.