Trellis Building

April 18th
If you learn anything from Mel Bartholomew's famous gardening book, 'Square Foot Gardening', it is to grow plants UP.  If space is limited, training plants onto some sort of structure and making use of the vertical space can increase your yield tremendously.  Rather than water pipes or electrical conduits that Mel uses, we opted to make trellises out of wood to match our rustic fence posts.

After a bit of online research, I settled on a simple, free, A-frame design. The address to this website is: http://www.vegetablegardener.com/item/8315/diy-a-frame-veggie-trellis.

 Upon David River's suggestion, I approached Resource, the recycled building materials company on Arapahoe for a donation of untreated lumber and hardware.  They were happy to oblige, so one snowy morning, with the help of a friendly Resource employee named Mark, I managed to rustle up several pieces of pine and sets of door hinges for the trellises.  Thank you Resource!

After the mismatched pieces were cut to size by Bill (my better half), David, Daniel and Belinda helped create trellises with the kids at the school.  As we brought out the cordless drills, staple guns, hammers and screw drivers, I could sense a keen interest in the kids.  David and the parent volunteers patiently showed the kids how to use these tools and the kids cooperated together to build the structures.  Making something with your hands that will impact many people is very rewarding.  I hope the kids will feel this way when the garden's vegetables make their appearance in the school's salad bar in May.