I don’t think we’ve ever talked about the mechanics of trellising and how we do it. Most gardeners figure it out, and there’s lots of ways to go about it, but we figure we can offer you all another reference point.
Our preferred method of trellising is using Grodan plant clips. These are basically injection molded clips that feature a clasp that allows the opening or securing of the clip. The clips are about 1 inch in diameter and can fit around virtually every kind of stem that we’ve tried them on.
We’ve used other things in the past, like Velcro strips and other more complicated contraptions. But, after using these, there’s just not much else that compares for ease of use and quality. We keep a couple hundred of them on hand, we never want to be wondering where they are or if we have enough.
Our preferred way of trellising is by using garden twine, secured between two or more physical points. We’ve laid out various eye hooks in our greenhouse that allow us to pull twine between various points where we’d want to trellis our plants. For some plants, like cucumbers, we may pull multiple pieces of twine between multiple eye hooks, allowing for multiple trellising “paths” if you will. This really helps us give big plants like cucumbers a little bit of berth from one another.
What we like about these Grodan clips is that they have a little clasp thing at the hinge which fully secures the clip to a piece of twine. This means we can get a fixed point on our twine and our trellising clips don’t move around. Remember, these are living plants and they can do things like exert force. We often just don’t notice it since the plants move ever so slowly!
There are decidedly other ways to trellis plants, too. For example, for our peas and beans, we just give them a piece of fencing to climb up. This works great when you have long lines of plants that need trellising. Also, these plants are natural climbers and rarely need any kind of assistance figuring out what to do. We’ve given up on cheap, plastic trellis as it just doesn’t last. Today, we prefer high quality fencing materials strung between poles when we want to trellis things this way.
So, that’s how we do it! If you think you’ve got some great trellising ideas, we’d love to hear about them!
