Over the years I have tried every possible method of supporting my vegetables.  I am married to a frugal husband (aka cheap Swede) and I have a bit of a budget when it comes to… well, everything.  This isn’t always a bad thing because it keeps me from spending willy nilly on things I don’t really need to spend money on.

My peas have always been a bit of a pain for me.  I love the pole style snap peas and even my so-called bush peas and beans have needed support.  I have tried using a single bamboo pole, a bamboo A frame, and other various support systems for my peas.  All have failed and by the end of the pea season they are unruly and broken.  I  lost tons of peas due to heavy vines snapping in a light wind.

Last year I came up with a plan to use a more rigid structure, copper.  I used copper tubing, some copper elbows and bird netting and made a fairly effective pea trellis.  It worked mostly ok for the beans and moderately well for the peas.  The peas I grow get so tall and heavy they push over most anything I build.

This year I modified my copper pipe system for the bush peas and my husband build me a new and totally improved pole pea system.  Today I wanted to showcase copper pipe system.

My pea beds are 5′ wide by 10′ long.  I planted my peas across the beds with rows 18″ apart.  This was the first improvement.  In past years I’ve tried to plant too much into these beds (as they were the only ones I had) and the vines intermingle if they are too close together.  This makes harvesting quite difficult.

At the end of each row I drove a 3′ piece of 3/8″  re-bar into the ground so about 2′ was still showing.

From there I slid 5′ copper pipes over the re-bar and secured it with a copper strap.  Last year I did not use the re-bar and just used the copper strap.  Over time the strap will stretch and the supports will flex.

Once the base of the frame was in place I connected the two uprights with a 5′ cross bar and attached bird netting to the pipes with zip-ties.

So far the peas are grabbing the bird netting and the structure is sound enough that it won’t sway to badly.  I am hoping that it will be sufficient for my bush peas.  I am not confident that it will work for the pole peas so for that we’ve built a larger more substantial system.  I’ll cover that for next weekend’s project.

I hope this gives you some ideas on how to support your garden.