Bean Trellis

The first year we grew a garden out here I decided to try to grow pole beans.  My father had always grown bush beans when I was growing up and I always found that picking them seemed tedious because you were always bent over trying to find the beans.  So pole beans were my choice.  Having never grown pole beans before I had no idea how tall a pole bean would grow, so I planted them along my four foot garden fence - on both sides of the garden.  I had no idea what I had gotten myself into.  Those beans quickly grew as tall as the fence and then started to reach for the sky.  Unfortunatly they got too heavy for that and just started to hang over the fence.  At the very least the wall of beans was nice for shade when you were picking out in the sun, but that many beans meant that I had to pick them every night for about 2 hours after work.  At their peak we were getting about two gallon ziplocs full of beans every night.  By the end of that season I never wanted to pick another green bean again!

Last year I wanted to try something different.  My beans were going to go into a smaller bed this time around, but there was nothing to support the beans in the center of the garden.  My answer to this was a bean tunnel made from PVC pipes and some twine. 

To hold the pipes in place I pounded some 2 ft. rebar into the ground at four foot intervals.  The pipes slid over that and voila I had my basic framework.  It took a few rearrangements of the connecting pieces to make it all stay together, but you get the basic idea.  Now I had to give the beans something to climb up, so I drilled holes through the pipes at one foot intervals and wove the twine through them, basically making a large holed net.  The twine actually served two purposes - it gave the beans something to climb up and it helped to reinforce the pvc framework which was rather flimsy.  I was just glad that it could stand up to the wind that we get out here every spring. 

The trellis actually held up fairly well until the end of the season.  Again the monster beans had overgrown their trellis and thier weight was slowly but surely dragging the whole thing down to the ground.  By the end you could no longer walk through the tunnel and laying on your back picking beans is not quite as much fun as it sounds.  We had enough beans for the year, so near the end I kinda gave up on it and just let the whole thing collapse.  Maybe I will have better luck this year.....just need to build a sturdier trellis.