![]() ![]() Pea Fenceįor a structure that’s nice and tall – eight feet, to be exact – try a pea fence, like this one from the Home Depot. This type of structure works best for small and medium-sized pumpkins and other types of gourds. Or, grow your gourds in containers and put the trellis anywhere you want! ![]() If you have a classic, ground-level garden, erect this structure wherever you plan to grow your gourds.įor raised bed gardeners, you’ll want to put it in the ground behind the raised bed box so that you can grow pumpkins in the bed and train them onto the adjacent trellis. Then get this five-foot-wide, 30-foot-tall nylon netting from Home Depot and use heavy-duty scissors to cut it down to five feet wide by six feet tall.įasten the netting to the posts with these zip ties. Try these 7-foot-tall posts from the Home Depot. One simple idea is to drive two U-posts into your garden five feet apart and 12 inches deep. If you’re handy with wood and want to fashion your own trellis, go for it! What Type of Trellis Should I Choose?īefore we get into the nitty-gritty of successfully training your pumpkin to grow on a trellis, let’s figure out which type will work best for you. That’s the huge draw of growing gourds on a trellis as well: the vines, leaves, and fruits all benefit from better airflow and fewer visits from pests, and therefore less disease and rot.Īnother benefit? If you have a small gardening area, you can actually grow pumpkins without worrying about the plant taking over the entire space. Before long, they were practically lying down on the often wet earth, just begging the slugs to eat them. If you look at the bottom of the raised bed, you’ll notice the peas reaching downward toward the earth. When I cracked one infested pod open, the peas were all slimy and rotted away.Įvery single pea vine that found a way to climb onto the adjacent tomato vines, on the other hand, stayed slug- and disease-free. The squishy beasts gnawed holes in the leaves and even in some of the pods. Not the gardening soil in the raised bed, but the regular old earth below it. They grew long and lovely in my raised bed, producing white blooms from which spilled fat green pods.Īnd then the vines grew so long that some of the pods and leaves dragged in the dirt. I planted peas this year that supposedly didn’t need any support in order to grow. Let me tell you the story of how I fell in love with vertical gardening for vining plants. Photo by Laura Melchor.īut at least it’s not resting on the soil, potentially getting soggy and bug-infested. It may just break the plastic trellis when it gets even larger – if I were to leave it without additional support, that is, which we’ll talk more about in a moment. ![]() ![]() Perhaps too wonderfully! One of my ‘Howden’ fruits is larger than my head. The vines and leaves have consumed it entirely.Įven though my plant is being supported by a tomato trellis, the gourds are growing wonderfully. Thankfully the tomatoes and pumpkins (and peas) get along swimmingly! Photo by Laura Melchor.īecause of that, I ended up having to force my tomatoes to share a plastic trellis with my ‘Howden’ vines, because you can’t even see the little bamboo hoop that I initially installed anymore. Somewhere in all my research about growing these members of the Cucurbitaceae family, I glossed over the well-documented fact that your average pumpkin vine can grow to anywhere from 10 to 20 feet in length. ![]()
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