Homegrown Garden

You know that niggling feeling you get when you know you haven’t finished a job? My three Marketmore cucumber plants have been steadily creeping across the polytunnel table, outgrowing their small pots and dying to go outside in the ground.

I knew I wanted to save space this year and build a trellis for the cucumbers to grow vertically…but with very limited funds and time I was stuck for weeks deciding how to do it. I was watering the polytunnel on Tuesday when I had a brain wave 💡 I still had the frame of a (flyaway) greenhouse that I dismantled early in the year. I also had some scrap plastic netting left over and even a few metres of wire that keeps chicken wire bound together. With these materials I made a trellis without spending a single penny!

I started by connecting the two panels of mesh together, measuring their width and assembled the frame to fit.

Then I tied the mesh to the frame using pieces of flexible wire, a couple of inches long.

I didn’t have quite enough mesh to fit the entire height of the frame, but I did have two un-used wire racking shelves that I connected together and fitted to the bottom end of the frame.

I sunk the frame 1 foot into the ground and dug in lots of manue to improve water retention, soil structure and boost the nutrients for the hungry cucumber plants.

Not having grown cucumbers before, I couldn’t believe how much the roots of the plants smelt of refreshing cucumber!



I planted the three plants (probably too close together), watered them in and carefully tied the vines to the support.



Oh and I gave those feelers a helping hand too by latching them onto the mesh!

The support stands over 8 feet tall and I’m confident that it won’t blow over, even with the weight of the cucumbers. Let’s see how it holds up and how many cucumbers I get in the next few months!