How to PLANT & GROW with Cattle Panel Arched Trellises | Vertical Gardening Help

heyo what's up I'm Jess welcome to roots and refuge farm currently in my garden it's a really warm spring evening I'm down here finalizing my plans for where my arch trellises are gonna go as you can see behind me here I have a couple of arts trellises and I actually have the cattle panels to put up about 10 more in the other areas of the garden we took him down this last fall we don't usually take them down every year but we took them down so that we could rearrange them because I just wanted to do something a little different than garden this year now a couple of years ago I made a video here on YouTube talking about these arched cattle panel trellises some people will call them arbors just vertical supports made out of a cattle panel and it's actually one of our most watched videos to date that video has led to a lot of frequently asked questions and today I'm kind of just wanting to answer those on a video just something that is referenceable that I can share whenever people ask questions and and sort of just a continuation of that first video I'm a huge fan of vertical gardening I just think it is so much easier on the gardener and it just really makes your gardening more successful as well as adding an element of beauty to your gardening space which I also think is really important making your garden a place that you want to be is definitely better for the plants that are growing there the best medicine for the garden is the gardener for sure so I believe in just having insurance against yourself and setting up a space you want to be in and for me that's what the cattle panel trellises have really done they're really practical they're do really well at growing stuff really wishing right now I had handled those massive weeds that have just sprung up but it is what it is these are super simple to make and put together it can be a really affordable option but I have run into some confusion with people just wanting some more clear information about how to plant on them now I'm just going to tell you what I do but I do encourage you to make it your own and figure out what you like you might not like to do it the way that I do actually put my panels with about 6 inches of space from the cattle panel to the edge of my garden bed I like to plant in the garden beds on the inside of the panel it really doesn't make a massive difference at all you could plant on the outside and I've seen many people put their panels in but it upright to the edge of the bed and they plan on the outside and that's fine if you plan on the inside how I do this is things grow up and if it's something like a melon at some point between the ground and where this curves it ends up growing through the panel and growing up the outside on the top it really doesn't make a lot of difference the reason I like the roots on the inside is just that whenever I'm going to tear the plants up or if I want to water them or fertilize them I like having that easier access to the roots on this side of the panel just because whatever I'm planting on the other side of the panel might be in the way of me accessing the base of this plant that's my logic I don't think it makes a massive difference now I'm actually getting ready to amend my garden beds by adding a couple inches of compost obviously getting all these weeds and mushrooms and stuff out of here and then I'm going to go ahead and direct sew on my trellises when you read the back of seed packages and a little label on your started plants there will be spacing suggestions and they're not very applicable to growing vertically those spacing suggestions really take into consideration what that plant needs to sprawl out so my way of doing this was really kind of just developed by trial and error just how I do it because I've found that it works for most things now the things that I grow on these trellises are specifically I really love to use them for cucumbers of all sorts that's gherkins pickling cucumbers slicers even the Armenian long cucumbers which are technically a melon but they grow really long I love to use them for small melons things like cantaloupes and honeydew's kajari melons banana melons anything that's kind of on the smaller side less than a few pounds I really like to use these and with anything like that that is going to get really big especially melons because they do detach from the vine when they're ripe you want to put those fruits and some sort of support like pantyhose or like a produce bag or whatever those are probably my favorite things to grow in this manner and what I do with any plant like that really is this 4-foot panel here I plant two of those plants on each side so two on this side and then the cattle panel goes over and I do two on that side and I just want to space them out here towards the end of the panel and come off this side and I'll put one plant right here and then there's a few feet here and then maybe a foot off this side I'll put one plant in right there so the roots of these plants are gonna have probably at least 24 inches here it's probably a touch more than that in between them and then a little bit of space where that plant can grow up all over and most importantly they're not going to be competing each other with each other for water I have had people tell me that they planted their trellises way heavier than that where they put like four or five melon plants on each side or they put like six cucumber plants the reason why I stick to two per side more than anything is because I live in an area that's very hot and humid and I think if you were prepared to fertilize and really stay on top of the water because they're being grown up and off the ground you could probably successfully plant more than two per side for me however I feel like with the heat and humidity here if I were to overcrowd these they would be vying for water they would and they would be choking each other out and without air flow you end up with fungal issues and all of that and so for me I just do two plants per side if you look back over the last couple of years at all of my garden tours what you are seeing is two plants per side on cucumbers melons anything like that it's two plants per side and they fill the trellis out really nicely because if you're doing this you want that beautiful green arch of foliage and the fruit hanging down I mean that's what you're going for with this because it is so stunning whenever it is in its prime like that and so you don't want to under plant it because you want to experience that but if you over plant it and you've got foliage choking each other out your arch if covered with diseased leaves and sad plants is not going to have the same effect so this stack of chairs is here might as well sit in it another thing that is really great on the trellises is beans they do really well I really really love the long beans on them those are such prolific plants they produce so much they're stunning visually when they're hanging all down on the trellis and you walk underneath them and what I do with any beans or peas is I just plant one seed at the base of each one of these metal pieces which they're actually four inches apart so I'll put one seed here one seed here wouldn't seed here once here and they essentially have this area to grow up and of course they'll put off offshoots and fill up the whole thing and I really love growing them that way now I have decided that I will no longer use these for dried beans because essentially what you have to realize is you've got a four feet on this side four feet on that set so you're talking about essentially an 8 foot row of whatever it is that you're growing and an 8 foot row of dried beans well it doesn't amount to much once you've got those things shelled ha it doesn't amount to a hill of beans it doesn't amount to help me look like it doesn't amount to much you end up with just a few handfuls if you're gonna grow beans for drying you really need to be able to grow more than 8 feet of them and so I do like it for snap beans pole beans especially if you don't have a big family now for me again I'm feeding five boys eight feet of snap beans doesn't really do just a whole lot for us but for a smaller family that would probably be sufficient and worth giving it the space but I really really love the noodle beans on here I've also grown runner beans multiple varieties of pole beans multiple varieties of dried beans at this point what I'm planning on doing this year is I'll probably do one or two trellises with long beans but I don't know that I'll do any beyond that I think that's probably the only beans because I'm gonna grow beans in a much larger space because my needs are a little greater for that another question that will come up often is people will ask can you grow different things on each side like can you put a cucumber on this side and beans on the other and the answer to that is yeah totally you can mix and match what is on your trellises the things that you want to keep into consideration and this is kind of how I do it and I personally like if I have one trellis and I want to grow a melon that I don't want for plants of or even that I don't want two plants of I'll mix it up and I'll put a map you know whenever I'm putting my two plants on each side I'll do two different kinds of melons and on the other side I might do two other kind especially if I'm like trying something new I don't necessarily want to cover a whole trellis with it and grow four plants of it because I might end up with way more of that thing that I want however I personally like to kind of keep it in the same family like I'll have a variety of cucumbers on one trellis and a variety of melons on one trellis and the reason why I personally do that I like the beautiful aesthetic look so if you grow you know different things they might have different growing speeds and so you might have one like really big lush side and one that's kind of still making its way to the top like things like cucumbers a lot of times they end earlier in the year for me at least because it gets really hot so they die back and that trellis needs to be replanted whereas I might have a melon on the other side that's still really lush and because I do like to keep the aesthetic kind of symmetrical and just the whole thing looking pretty I will usually try to keep the same type of plant on one trellis but I might have multiple varieties the other thing with that and the reason why I like to keep them the same especially on the same side of the trellis like I don't want to plant a cucumber and a tomato because those are gonna have different water needs like cucumbers are really thirsty so I like to keep those next to each other so I can make sure that I'm watering both of those extra and it just sort of simplifies it for me when I've got like multiple cucumbers on the same trellis that's just a personal preference though you could completely mix it up you could grow two different things on each side to really utilize the trellis I just mentioned growing a tomato on an arch and so I know that's probably going to bring up some questions about like can you and I'm of course you can grow pretty much anything on these trellises that needs vertical support now with tomato tomatoes are not climbers now they need to be staked and so whenever you're growing a tomato on a vertical support like this you're going to tie it on there it's not only a grab hold and climb with a melon and a cucumber and with beans they actually climb and so they're gonna when it gets to the top of this they're gonna curve with it and they're gonna go up and fill out all in the top and things like tomatoes and peas they're not going to do that now you can use this as your vertical support and you may need to especially if you're growing in a small garden you know you can grow your melons on one side and then your tomatoes on this side if you need a place to put your tomatoes where you can support them but just know that like when your tomato gets here it's not going to go with the curvature is gonna go straight up and that might be okay but again if you're going for a certain look that might not be what you want to do with your arch another commonly asked questions is how far apart are a beds they are about four feet we use irregular materials with the posts and these cuttings so probably more like this post is 4-foot from this post so this is maybe a little further and then when you consider in how much further this goes in the base of these trellises is probably more like five feet apart and of course there are lifted up off the ground but that doesn't mean that's necessarily the only way that you can do it seen some people pull them in really close together and they're really tall and arching at a more severe angle and they're also really beautiful so these are four feet wide and they're 16 feet long I've been asked what gauge of wire they are and I don't really know that is not ever I've never seen that listed whenever we've bought these but as you can see they are I mean they're not thin these are hard to bend it's not it's not like like rolled fencing is a lot thinner than these they may be called livestock panels cattle panels there are also hog panels which sometimes the different names and the different types usually there's still four by 16 but the squares might be a different size like hog panels don't have quite as wide squares and some panels will only be three feet wide they're just for lower fencing a couple other things that we've repeatedly been asked over the last couple of years and how do you get these things home from the store we use a trailer now I've seen a lot of people get pretty innovative on this and Bend these in the back of a truck bed I imagine that's not easy to do by any means but I have seen it done now a lot of times I've been tagged in a lot of pictures of cattle panels bent in the back of truck beds however my friend Josh he has a YouTube channel called the city stead and he's living in town doesn't have a truck and trailer and he actually had a really cool method that he did to do an arch trellis and get around that problem of not being able to get 16 foot panels home I will link the video he did down below it's been also a couple years ago but he did get eight-foot pieces and ratchet strap him down and his panels are really cool it's not like a super smooth arch but he attached him at the top and so that could be a solution for you so you so go check out that video by Josh and give him a follow because he's really awesome another thing that I've heard a lot of times as people have basically asked like hey what do I ask for at my feed store because they don't have these here they don't know what that is and here where I live these are called cattle panels everywhere like if you go into a feed store that's what called I'm going to tell you the solution of what I would do and I need you to know I swear I'm not being facetious when I say this to you Google cattle panel go to Google Images get a picture of it and go into the farm store or the tractor supply or whatever whatever farm supply store you have a cofee do op anything like that and show them the picture and say this is what I'm looking for that will probably help any sort of like barrier of terminology it might be caught I've heard people say livestock panels and just different things like that but that should do it if you take that picture in and say this is what I'm looking for and I have been told in some places that these are way more expensive than they are here here they're like 20 bucks 25 bucks and so I know a lot of people are living in areas that aren't nearly as rural is where I am and so they might not be as common a thing I've also been told that rebar works concrete rebar that you can buy that in sheets don't know I've never done that personally and I've seen a lot of people get creative using PVC pipe fencing and I have done some experimenting with fencing before but I've just not done a whole lot of that one more thing to consider when you're planting and this has come up in conversation people ask me how much weight these can hold I've never in my experience of growing on these and I've been doing it for a handful of years now I've never had one collapse or fall over we live on a ridge it gets relatively windy here I mean we get like tornadoes in this area but I don't know I mean I know that there are some places that are like in prairies and stuff that just get insanely high winds all the time I can't say that we do so I don't really know personally on that but I've had these completely loaded down with fruit before and I'm sure that they're heavy and they don't go anywhere because of the fact that they're bent like this I think that they could hold a lot of weight and not have problems I just felt like the window weight is really evenly distributed you don't have to worry that much about it I guess that if you were in a place with really really high winds and you were trying to grow four plants of icebox melons or something very very heavy that we're getting it really heavy late in that you might run into a problem but I think if you added an extra tea post and you just said to tea post on each side if you know that you're in a place that has high winds and you're wanting to grow heavy things I really think that it would probably be okay because we just do one tea post per side and I grow small melons and large cucumbers and I I mean I've seen them very heavy laden and we've never had an issue I may have forgotten something hopefully not hopefully I covered all of the frequently asked questions that we get about growing on cattle panels over the last handful of years since I've been growing on arch cattle panels I just I have grown so much food on them and they just add so much beauty to the garden at a really low cost I think they're both pleasing aesthetically as well as being just super practical if you have any other questions that I didn't cover leave them in a comment down below and I'll do my best to get to those thank you guys for hanging out with me today I hope that you're encouraged and inspired I bless you until next time

Channel: Roots and Refuge Farm

Views: 157,906

Keywords: roots and refuge, roots and refuge farm, small farm, hobby farm, backyard farm, grow your own food, how to grow food, vertical gardening, arched trellises, cattle panel trellis, trellis ideas, gardening ideas, gardening vlog

Id: xuKHSUkHv6E

Length: 18min 59sec (1139 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 25 2020