Trash Trellising with Dalena Rogers

Hello again! For this blog post, I’d like to talk about my leadership project. This summer, I have been working on creating trellising systems for tomatoes, watermelons/pumpkins, and kale/mums. The overall goals for these trellises is to make harvesting easier on both us and the plants, require less human labor to install and maintain, and even to prepare plants for a future display (kale and mums need a little extra help to grow vertically). With my professional interests in sustainability and international development, I wanted to create these trellises using low-cost, repurposed materials that could be accessed on a mostly global scale. Thus, here I am, introducing trash trellises! The trellis pictured above is made of scrap plywood and snow fence I quite literally found on the ground! So far, one A-frame trellis structure for the cucurbit crops (as pictured above) is installed with a second one soon to follow, and the kale and mums trellis made of PvC pipe and trellising netting will be installed later this week. For the tomatoes, half are currently trellised using leftover round cages and the other half will eventually be trellised with a hanging system made of PvC pipe, twine, and bread ties.

By Dalena Rogers