Home Gardening - How to Make Your Own Trellis

Trellis is a simple structure used by gardeners to support vines. Most vines with tendrils need a support to twirl onto.

If you are looking to grow vines such as cucumbers, grapes or flowering vines like winter creeper and start jasmine in your home garden, you can build a simple trellis to support them. You don't need to hire any external help to build a trellis, you can do it quite easily.

There are several types of trellis out there the most popular being the lattice trellis. The simplest to make on your own, in the least possible time, out be the post and wire trellis.

Materials used in a Trellis

To make a simple "post and wire" trellis you would require PVC pipes around 3-4 inches in diameter. It would look good if you paint the PVC pipes with a green shade.

Get some colored wires around 1 inch in diameter. You can get it from any shop selling electrical goods. Have some wire clippers.

Steps to makes the Trellis

Below are the steps to put a trellis in place

  • Dig a 5 inch hole in the ground where you would like to erect the trellis. Make another hole at a suitable distance.
  • Place the PVC pipes in the hole and compact the soil around it.
  • Make sure the PVC pipes are fixed sturdily in the soil
  • Now create a lattice using the wires by crisscrossing them between the PVC pipes
  • Use wire clipper to hold the wires in place. You can also use a synthetic tape for this purpose.
  • Instead of crisscrossing the wires you can just string them parallel to each other. This would work well in the case of grape vines.

When you are done the structure should look like the picture above

Vines that do well on Trellis

Vines which use tendrils for support grow well using a trellis as support. If you are considering flowering vines you can choose from the vines below

  • Sweet Pea Vines
  • Passion Flower Vines
  • Wintercreeper
  • Trumpet Vine

You can also go in for twining vines. If you are going to plant twining vines it would be better to go with a lattice structure. The twining vines you can grow are

  • Moon flower
  • Morning Glory
  • Wisteria
  • Star Jasmine

You can use wood stripes instead of PVC pipes for the posts. Another possibility is the use of copper rods. If you don't like the look of plastic coating on the wires on your trellis, you can just use thin copper wires which don't have a coating.