The Cucumber Fence
When I was a kid, we lived on 4.5 acres and had a ton of gardens. My Dad always used to till along the fence row and let the cucumbers climb the fence. It made them super easy to harvest. Mrs. B uses a stack of tomato cages made of fencing for her cukes, but it can take a bit of manuveuring to harvest the cukes. I knew I wanted something more like my Dad had for cukes in the long run.
A few weeks back, R and I went down to Alvin to pick up some parts that R had ordered for his lawnmower. Since R used to work for the man he ordered the parts from, we got a tour of his garden. In it, he had a cool little fence for his cukes to climb. His fencing was made from electrical conduit and driveway rebar, and I knew I’d found the something close to the solution I was looking for.
So with a little help from R, we created something similar for my cukes to climb. Here’s what you need to make a cuke fence that is about 10 feet long (we got our supplies at Home Depot):
Edited to Add 9/30/09 – We made a second conduit trellis this past weekend. We used 3/4″ conduit instead of the 1/2″ and it was much sturdier.
2 pieces of 3/4″ electrical conduit.
2 pieces of bent 3/4″ electrical conduit
1 package of BLACK zip ties (Per R the reason that you need black zip ties is that they don’t degrade over time due to sunlight)
4 3/4″ diameter couplings (the package we got had 5 couplings in it)
1 roll of Fencing (I’d go with at least 4×4 on this)
Screwdriver
Wire snips
Cut one of the long pieces of conduit in half. These are legs of the fence.
Lay all the conduit pieces and the couplings out so you can make sure you have everything you need.
Take the long piece, one of bent pieces of conduit, a short piece of conduit, and two of the couplings and lay them out as shown below:
Put the coupling on the long piece.
Tighten the first screw but don’t snug it up just yet.
Add the bent conduit.
And tighten the screw for it.
Again, don’t tighten the screw all the way since you might need to make adjustments later on.
Add the second coupling at the bottom of the bent piece of conduit
Tighten it. and then add the piece of conduit that will act like the leg and tighten the screw for it.
Repeat on the other side.
Once you’ve got the conduit together, your frame looks like this:
For the next part you’ll need the fencing, the zip ties and the wire snips.
Unroll the fencing.
Take a zip tie and losely bind the fencing to the frame. You don’t want to make the zip tie tight. You want to be able to adjust their position when you put them in the ground.
Put a zip tie about every 2 squares until you get to the top.
Roll the wire out to the other side and snip the fencing so there’s a square at the other end. You need to square so you can secure the fencing to frame.
Secure the other side with zip ties and then secure the tops with them.
Carry it to the garden and put it in the ground
And when your cukes get big enough, they’ll start climbing the frame
