DIY Teepee Vegetable Trellis
By making use of items already on your property, such as upcycling pruned branches, you can create a functional and cost-effective vegetable garden trellis. You will love all the different ways we have utilized this trellis in our garden.
Upcycled Pruned Branches as Teepee
Late winter, when the trees are still dormant, is when we should be pruning many deciduous trees, including fruit trees. On our property we have an incredibly overgrown apple tree that is both my favourite element and our biggest task.
Each year we attempt to thin and shape the tree to make it more manageable. On this round we brought down some structurally-sizable limbs that were more than usual whispy twigs and knew we had to make use of them.
Using our upcycled pruned branches we made a teepee. Uses of this teepee can include a vegetable trellis, flower tower or child play-structure. It was a ghost for halloween, and a Christmas tree over the winter holidays. You could even make your dogs feel like the royalty that they are, by providing a shady structure to lie within in the summer!
To create a structure like this you will need:
Sticks/Poles (dowels, bamboo etc). We used apple branches in 7' lengths +/-
Rope
Drill + Drill bit. Drill bit size should reflect rope thickness
Scissors
Total Cost: $6CDN (rope)
The longer your branches, the taller the inner space can be or the wider the footprint. If you have a size in mind and are struggling with the math, this nifty calculator should help.
Assembly:
Drill a hole through each branch/pole at the same height.
This height is where you want the ‘vertex of your cone’ (the union point where all the sticks intersect) to be.
For ex: Our branches were all approximately 7’ in length, a hole was drilled 6’ from the base of the branch.
Thread the rope through each hole.
Gather the branches/poles into a bunch and wrap the rope around the union point a few more times before securing with a knot.
Leave a bit of slack in the rope for any grade unevenness and for final placement fine-tuning.
Set it up! Although doable with one person it is much easier with a friend to help.
Depending on your use for the structure, fabric can be added to turn it into a tent, or a rug below. It can be placed into containers to make a vertical garden on a driveway or balcony or placed directly into a garden bed for plants to climb on.
The initial plan was that it would add to our Natural Playground plans and be a play structure, but as spring wore on it was repurposed as a plant trellis, Halloween Ghost and Christmas Light Display.