The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

How to make a pea trellis

Snow pea seedling coming upWhen the peas start poking their heads out of the ground, it's time to hurry up and put in a trellis.  Over the past few years, we've explored a few different trellising techniques, and I feel like we've finally settled on the best option.

Peas need to be rotated like most other crops --- I tried to grow them in the same spot two seasons in a row and yields went way down.  So your trellis needs to be easy to assemble and disassemble --- permanent posts in the ground are a pain in the butt.

I bought a bunch of light, three foot metal fence posts for about $2 apiece a few years ago, and they work great for my shorter, shelling peas.  Just pound them in the ground and string up the trellis material (more on that in a minute) and you're good to go.  Read more....



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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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I used an old chain-link fence along with the pipes and hardware as a trellis so instead of moving the trellis I just rotate the crops to another area. It was easy to install because I drove the pipes into the ground instead of using concrete.
Comment by zimmy Mon Apr 26 19:16:12 2010
I'm not quite envisioning your setup. Does the trellis run through a large area, is that why you don't have to move it and can just rotate the crops along it?
Comment by anna Mon Apr 26 20:00:22 2010
My garden is 14ft by 80ft and runs on an east west axis. The chain-link fence trellis runs the full length of the garden but along the north side of the garden. The main path runs through the center of the garden with other paths running parallel and perpendicular to the mane path. I can grow (or not grow) my crops on the south side of my trellis and leave ares along the trellis fallow for next year. Hope this explains it well enough. This will be my first year at trying this, but I see no reason why it shouldn't work. If you ever get an area on this site to post photos, I will post a few pics. of my homestead.
Comment by Anonymous Wed Apr 28 10:35:10 2010

Thanks --- that makes perfect sense! It sounds like a really good system too.

I'd love to make it so that other people can post pictures, but I doubt I'll try to figure that out until winter. The gardening locomotive is in full steam and it's hard to pull myself indoors!

Comment by anna Wed Apr 28 16:02:03 2010





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