Two Trellises

Well I've been working in the garden and building "outside" stuff for the last few weeks.

First I planted the garden and built a quick-and-dirty PVC trellis for my garden. It has gourds planted on one side and cucumbers on the other. Hopefully by the end of summer they will have enveloped the whole thing. I didn't spend a lot of time building it because I wanted to see how well it works before I spend hours making a nice looking one. And yes this is a long distance shot because not much was up yet except for the weeds.



Then I built a trellis/arbor for my yard. It's about 20 feet long and currently has 250 feet of cable for the plants to grow on. (You can't really see it in the picture, because most of it hadn't been strung when I took the photo.) I still have to wire the center section (another 200 or so feet of wire). I actually wrote a Java program to do the "wire diagram" (well list of points) and to figure out how much wire I need for a particular pattern. (Lots for anything interesting.) It also draws the pattern on the screen so that I can play around and see which one looks best.



Between times (i.e. when it was too dark to see outside) I turned a couple of finials for the top of my fence posts. (Among other things I'll write about in another post.) My garden actually has two sets of fences and posts. I fenced the garden with wire fencing to keep the deer out and then planted flower beds around the edges. The deer kept eating the flowers so I put cheap plastic fence around the flower beds. These finials go on the round metal corner posts on the "flower" fences. Once I finish them that is.


I spent this weekend building a trellis for my Mom & Dad, with lots of help from my older brother Mike. I was glad Mike stopped by to help as everything came out much nicer that it would of if I had done it myself. This replaced a trellis that Dad built that everyone kept banging their heads on (and it was also ugly...Dad's not much of a carpenter).

This would have been easier if I would have had more time. Mike had made a drawing that Mom was supposed to mail and forgot (they live an hour away). So I basically built 6 foot arch sections that could be assembled as needed. In one night. I made enough arch and spindles (across the tops) for a 24 foot span, but we only needed an 18 foot span.

And yes I did write a Java program to figure out the arch segments too. It's not too tricky to cut an arch out of a section of board, but it is pretty tricky to visualize the height gain over the span. I wanted to make sure that it would be tall enough, even with 3 feet of the 10 foot 4x4s in the ground for everyone to walk under. The ground slopes down to the right in the picture so the side on the left is almost exactly 6 feet from bottom of the arch to the ground. These arch segments had an 14 to 16 inch rise in the middle over an 18 foot span. That works out to about a 29 foot radius for the circle this is (nominally) a section of.

I was originally going to do mortises and floating tenons to join the arch sections, but didn't have time. Instead we just used to pieces of plywood to join them; one on each side. To make the front ones look a little better I took a hole saw an cut off the corners on the outside pieces. Gravity should hold it together pretty well as long as the posts don't spread apart too far.

Like most projects it didn't come out as well as I hoped, but better than I expected.

Well off to bed...this week is going to be extremely busy too as I'm hosting a cookout next weekend. Lots of weeding and cleaning to do. Turning finials, cutting arches and ripping spindles creates lots of saw dust. And my shop is in the house...with no dust collection...and I'm not much of a housekeeper either.