Growing cucumbers on a trellis is fun and easy

Supporting poles / metal T fence post:  

When selecting the best poles, or fence posts for use in building a sturdy garden trellis. One extremely important thing we need keep in mind. Our garden trellis must support not only the combined weight of maturing cucumber plants, and all the ripening cukes hanging from the vines. As gardeners in the know will attest, mature cucumber vines full of ripening cukes. Do become quite heavy, and tend to catch not only mild summer breezes blowing dust. Vines full of ripening cukes will catch the strong winds from summer rain filled thunderstorms, which will most definitely topple weakly built cucumber trellises, jeopardizing some unlucky gardener’s entire harvest season.

Inexpensive and easily obtained at any farm supply store, or the amazon links included in this article. Heavy-duty T-posts are available in many different lengths; 5-foot, 6, and even 8-foot lengths work great for taller fence style garden trellises. The thing to keep in mind here, when selecting the proper size fence post, remember you will need to allow at least one foot of a heavy or light-duty metal post length for driving into loosely tilled and loamy garden soils.

Which is to say, loose slightly compacted and sandy soils do require driving posts as much as 6-inches to a foot deeper. Test by leaning on the top of the post a bit, the trick here is to not bend to post, simply make sure the post is deep enough the fence post is not easily pushed over.

Caution, the 5 - foot light -duty metal fence post pictured just to the left, are extremely easy to bend, it is best to only used light - duty post for trellises not more than 4 - foot tall, taller trellis use the heavy -duty posts..

Step one: Layout fence posts with the bottom of each post setting on the locations you marked indicating where you want to build the trellis. The top of each post 6 - inches is painted white, or yellow, the bottom end of each post has a metal cleat attached one foot from the opposite painted end. Drive post into soil so metal cleat top edge is level with, or just a bit under the surface.

Tip for cutting concrete wire to length, when cutting the wire to length my experience has shown cutting each horizontal wire flush with the vertical wire. Leaves uniform lengths of wire approximately 6-inch long, that work well as anchors when pushed into the ground. Personally, I prefer to use the bits of wire to attach the trellis to the fence via eye-bolts secured to the wood fence.      

Additionally, attach wire to post using a 12-inch piece of the tie wire recommended in this article, wrap the tie wire around each horizontal strand of concrete wire on each side of the post, and wrap the tie wire behind the T-post a couple times and twist the ends together.