Monday, July 12, 2010

The Cucumbers Get A Lift

Today we finally put some A frame trellis supports into the Hawthorne garden to take the cucumber plants vertical.  Like all good projects, we had talked about it for some time before actually putting our plans into action.  There are probably lots of ways to do something like this but we like the plan we came up with.


We originally planned to have four separate free-standing A frames, each roughly 8 feet long, straddling about 30 linear feet of growing beds.  However, once the lumber was cut and we started assembly, it made more sense to join them all together to make a continuous A frame tunnel on each side of the central path.




Each A frame was built using using two pieces of eight foot long 2×4 pine lumber.  One of these was ripped down its long dimension on the table saw and then each resulting piece was cut in half to produce four 2×2 pieces each four feet long for the two end A frames.  The other 2×4 was ripped lengthwise to produce four pieces each eight feet long and 2 x 7/8 inches for the cross pieces.  5/16 x 3 1/2 inch galvanized carriage bolts with washers and nuts were used to join the A frame legs together at the top.  This also allowed us to adjust the footprint of the assembled structure by spreading the A frame legs.  This was repeated for each of the four A frames and the total cost of materials for each frame was about $9.   Twine threaded through the cross pieces completed the installation.

The view down the A frame tunnel, covered in cucumber vines in another few weeks we hope.