Today's Project: Wire Trellising

I was looking at the pea plants growing in our raised beds and tried to think of a way to get them to climb the fences instead of taking up precious room in the beds.

I initially thought about securing bird netting against the fence, but I’m not a huge fan of the net material because of the propensity to catch small animals in it (birds, lizards, etc.) That got me thinking about what material could act as a matrix/web/trellis and give climbers like peas and beans the support they need.

Eyebolts secured to the horizontal posts with wire strung between them would do the trick.

So off we were to the home improvement store to get the necessary materials, and a long-handled hoe for me. (Chris – you can stop laughing every time I say “hoe” already. Thanks.) We picked up some eyebolts, 1/32" wire, and on the recommendation of a co-worker, some ferrule clamps to secure the wire.

Arriving home, we predrilled holes for the eyebolts and installed them on the posts, ensuring each was level with the one directly across from it. We set them 12" apart on the posts.







Then we strung wire between the eyebolts, clamping the wire to the first eyebolt before stringing. We wired straight across, then back across to the next one up, creating a cross-crossing pattern. At the final eyebolt, we again clamped the wire, ensuring it was as taut as we could possibly get it.

We wanted to do the next section of fencing, but I don't think we bought enough wire and it was freezing outside (yeah yeah. Cold to me is 50^o with winds to 16 mph.) Plus I didn't want to rush the project and cut corners, especially since there's not much to plant right now anyway.

Here are some before and after shots.
BEFORE AFTER












FINISHED PRODUCT













Here are all of the tools we used in this project (click for larger view).

Project costs:

$9.94 2 packages of 25 eyebolts
$2.10 2 packages ferrule clamps
$14.30 65' wire (1/32" thickness)
$26.34 TOTAL

This little project took less than an hour. We will definitely repeat this process for other fencing sections as well.



(And PS - if you can't open the pictures larger, I apologize. Blogger is being weird about my pictures in the last few posts. Hopefully it will resolve itself soon.)