Extending a Square Foot Garden Trellis

Mel Bartholomew's design for a trellis in his book square foot gardening is excellent in many ways. You can cheaply build it from electrical conduit, it is very sturdy and they just plain look good and work great.

They do have three downfalls though; they are not that tall for many varieties of beans which easily out grow them. They are also one flat dimension and that leads to crowding if you plant at a full square foot density. The steel also gets very hot and that means you can't train beans onto it or they scortch.

With this low cost easy addition of bamboo and zip ties you can get maximum production from your survival garden and still use Mel's outstanding design as the primary support for your trellis.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• survival garden
• square foot garden
• electric conduit trellis
• mel Bartholomew
• survival
• survivalist
• survival podcast

[misskisskadee]

how do u install ur trellis ? my garden is very rocky & i cant dig deeper to put my post to stand can u give me any advice what to do pls show us how u did ur trellis !! thanks alot !!

[noslrac1980]

@noslrac1980 I used 18 in rebar and ended up pushing the conduit into the ground a little. I still got about 7.5 ft tall trellis.

The only other mods I added was a small (cheapest) t-post at each end of the 12' bed zip tied to one side of the trellis. I then zip tied the middle section of each trellis to one another. This made for a very stout trellis.

This gives you a 12 foot section of trellis

[noslrac1980]

@noslrac1980 I don't have the exact measurements but you can look up the length of conduit it takes and the resulting radius and calculate where to bend it to get a 3 foot section on the short side of the L so that when you connect two of them you get a 6 ft. trellis. The conduit bender had some documentation for these calculations.

[noslrac1980]

I bought a 1/2 in. conduit bender because those elbows were relatively expensive and I was planning on making quite a few.

I have 3'x12' raised beds. You can make a 6' wide trellis much taller than Mel's design if you use the conduit bender to put a 90 degree bend in two 12 foot lengths of conduit and connecting them with the much cheaper in-line joints.

[ThePatriotNurse]

I'm a big fan of el-cheapo netting. I have had good success with using a netting, anchored to bamboo, running up onto a tree for my Louisiana Purple Pod Beans!