I'm Joel Warren.
I'm a master gardener intern here at the demonstration garden in Montgomery
County and one of the projects we've done this year was to design and build
structures, bamboo,
trellises and support structures for our plants and as with any garden process,
you start by planning what you want to grow and what based on that,
what the plants need. If you have growing vines,
you're going to need trellises to support them. If you have tomatoes,
you need some kind of a basket to contain them and the materials that I chose to
use are bamboo because they are readily available and it's inexpensive and I'm
kind of frugal.
I like to build things and save money if I can and I've made a point of using
material that's readily available.
There are excellent examples of some of the different structures that I've made.
This is just a basic triangle.
It's like a teepee but is used as a structure to start with to build a tomato
cage and we put cross pieces on.
I'm a strong believer in triangulation because that adds strength to anything
you build.
The first thing we did this year was to start with the tomato cage and this was
referred to as a beer box tomato cage because we use a box can be any box,
uh, as a jig to support them at the sticks while you're building it.
And on this one you can see we've got with an orange cable tie,
very easy to put together and it holds everything together while you're building
the cross members. You can cut it with almost any kind of a saw.
I use a trimming saw readily available again at hardware stores.
I think I paid $10 for this one and it's got a nice big braid,
big teeth, it cuts quickly,
but you could use a Hacksaw or any kind of a wood saw.
Works perfectly fine.
The material that I use for fastening,
it's polypropylene cord.
I like the polypropylene because it's somewhat elastic and when you tie that the
knots, it squeezes the material together so it makes it nice and tight.
But again, cable ties readily available at the hardware store,
I use a lot of twine. This is Jude,
I believe to provide material for the vines to grow onto.
I don't use this for tying the knots to support for the support members because
it's not elastic and it does break down in the weather more quickly.
One of the things that a lot of people are intimidated by when the growing stuff
is not knowing how to do the knots,
so I've got a variety of different ways to fasten things together.
If you don't do the knots, you can use things like cable ties.
You don't get your merit badge for knot tying, but it's still an easy to do it.
For a basic Japanese tie,
I usually use about five or six feet of cord, which is more than I usually need,
but it's easier to cut the ends off than to try to get a knot tied if you just
don't have enough string leftover. Again,
I mentioned that you want to tie it above so your cross pieces are above the
node, this the line goes behind the node.
Just take a cross over the top of the cross piece and then wrap behind the
vertical line with your cord.
So that's going to hold it in place. You've got the bottom one,
so giving support cross again and
cross the two ends of the cord behind the node and then back up and I crossed
them over. So you have an X in the front
again cross behind. And then to tie it all together,
I do a half hitch with just a basic one line over the other at the top and I
pull that and then pull it down and tie another half hitch at the bottom.
And what that does is to pull the two side pieces together,
it stretches the cord a little bit and it locks the uh,
the material together. The polypropylene has a little bit of give to it,
so you stretch it out a little bit, do another half hitch.
So you have a square knot and basically that's your, your tie.
To make it look pretty,
you trim the ends off so you don't have a lot of loose string.
But basically it's done at that point and you can see the notice at the bottom.
It's nice and tight. The line's not going to slide down the vertical stem.
So you have good strength there.
An important thing to remember when you build something like this is that you
have to anchor it.
And once I would build a structure like this,
I would go around and take a shorter section of bamboo and my trusty hammer and
just drive it into the ground and then tie the two together.
The advantage of that,
rather than trying to put the tall pieces into the ground,
is you don't have to hammer over your head. And at the end of the season,
you just disconnect it. And you can take the, uh, the structure with you.
If you have a place to store it, you can use it again the next year. If you,
if you think about the bamboo being in the ground, that part's gonna rot.
So you may get one season out of a, out of a structure.
If you put it into the ground, if you have one,
you can put away out of the weather, you can use it for a number of years.