Two Feet in the Dirt

Using the vertical space in your garden is a great way to get the most yield out of a small area. There are tons of inventive, more complex vertical gardening systems, but you can still take advantage of vertical space while staying simple. It’s common to provide trellis support for crops like tomatoes and beans, but other crops like cucumbers, winter squash, and melons can be trellised vertically as well. All of these plants are expansive growers, creating a lot of green leaves and stems in proportion to the amount of fruit produced. Because of this, they can take up a significant amount of ground space, which can easily be freed back up for other crops by introducing a trellising system. 

Here’s the simple technique I use to trellis cucumbers: simply hammer 5-foot-tall wooden posts every 4 feet along your row of cucumbers (cucumbers should be spaced one plant every 12 inches). Then run 2 horizontal lines of trellising twine, one between the top of the posts and one along the very bottom near the ground. Make sure these horizontal lines are very taut. Next, run vertical pieces of trellising twine up and down between the top and bottom lines. (Check out the picture above to see this technique in practice.) Unlike beans and peas, which will cling onto a trellis on their own, you’ll need to help the cucumber plants climb vertically by gently wrapping the plant around a corresponding piece of vertical twine every few days. A bonus to trellising cucumbers is that the fruit will grow nice and straight with the help of gravity!