Creative Gardening With Arches

If you were around last year, you may remember that my cucumbers, watermelons and pumkins took over the whole dang yard in late summer.  They spilled out of the raised beds and across the lawn and, while beautiful, it meant we couldn't mow that area for a month and a half. 

So I spent the winter thinking about what I could do to fix it:  move them to a different location, give them their own bed...hmmm, what to do?  And then I thought "why not go UP?"  And the idea of using arches to do that was born.  As my garden design came together for this year, I thought an arch trellis would be great to allow the cucumbers (on one side) and the spaghetti squash (on the other side) to grow up the trellis over the Contender and Blue Lake bush beans, where they would shelter them from too much sun as the summer heat grows.

I looked and looked and looked some more on Craigslist and elsewhere for some used fence panels, but there were none to be had.  So we loaded up the truck and trailer and headed to Tractor Supply where we snagged a 50" x 16' goat panel.  I have no idea why it's called a goat panel (do you?).

Once we arched it, however, we realized that it was way too tall so we cut off about 4 feet of it.  I'll use that as a trellis elsewhere in the garden.

Cutting the fence panel with a grinder was the fastest way to "get er done".  It only took a couple of minutes.

Cutting the panel left some prongs on one end.  Turns out that it was really useful to stick those down into the ground to make the whole thing more stable.  But we also sank some rebar into the ground and tied the panel to it with metal ties.  When the plants grow up, I can just see it becoming a sail in the summer wind if it's not tied down well.

Click the pic to biggify and you might be able to make out our teeny cucumber plants to the left of the trellis.  They'll be climbing shortly.  Most of the green in the middle of the arch is the bush beans and we noticed yesterday that they have teensy weensy little bean pods on them.

Turns out the panel fit perfectly within our garden bed with about an inch to spare! All that was left was to get the squash started up the trellis. One of the runners was over 3 feet long, so we couldn't have waited much longer to get this trellis in.

Spaghetti squash vining up the new arch. Crossing my fingers that this works!

What kind of creative garden ideas have you used or are thinking about using?  I'd love to hear about them....leave me a comment!

I'm linking up to this week's Homesteader Blog Carnival, Homestead Barn Hop, Frugal Days Sustainable Ways, Teach Me Tuesday and Tuesday Garden Party.  Go check it out!