How to build a trellis for climbing vegetables

February 18, 2025

What a trellis actually does for you

Beans and cucumbers will grow perfectly happily flat on the ground, and then you spend the whole season lifting leaves to find the fruit, and a fair bit of what you do find has gone soft where it sat in the damp or something has already had a go at it. Get the same plants up on a frame and the air moves through them, and you're picking fruit you can actually see, standing up instead of on your knees. It also gives you a lot more garden out of the same patch of dirt, which matters when the veggie bed is a couple of square metres like most of ours are.

Buy the panel, or build it out of stakes

There are two ways to do this and neither one is better than the other, it just depends on how much you feel like doing on a Saturday.

The quick way is a treated pine trellis panel. We carry them 2.4m long and in heights from 900mm up to 1.5m, with a 50mm or a 100mm grid, square or diamond. You screw it to a fence, a shed wall or a couple of posts, and that's the job done.

The cheaper way is garden stakes and twine. Hardwood stakes run from 900mm up to 1.8m, bamboo comes in bundles, and there are plastic-coated steel ones from 1.5m to 2.1m that won't rot off at ground level the way timber eventually does. Sink whichever you use at least 300mm in, lean two rows towards each other and tie them off at the top so you finish with an A-frame, then run twine between them for the plants to grab. An A-frame handles wind a lot better than a flat panel, and we get plenty of wind here.

What will actually climb it

Climbing beans. They'll take the whole height of whatever you give them and they're about the easiest thing in the patch to get right.
Peas. They send out tendrils and grab on by themselves, so you do nothing except get the frame in before you sow.
Cucumbers. They'll sprawl if you let them, and they come out straighter and cleaner grown up.
Small pumpkins and rockmelons. They'll climb, but the fruit gets heavy, so it wants a sling out of an old stocking once it sizes up.

Tomatoes get lumped in with the climbers and they don't really belong there, because they've got nothing to grab with. They get tied to a stake or threaded through the trellis by hand as they go, which is a job you do every week or so rather than once.

The bit people get wrong

Get the frame in before you sow, not after. Once the beans are away you're driving a stake down through a root system you can't see, and the plant wears it either way.

And go deeper than feels necessary. A trellis catches wind like a sail once it's covered in leaf, and a 1.5m panel with a crop hanging off it will lever itself straight out of soft ground if it's only in a hand's depth. That's how they nearly always fail, and it happens in the first decent blow after the plants fill out.

None of this is hard. It's just unfamiliar the first time, and those are different problems.

Shop related products

D.T. Brown Cucumber Lebanese, 75 seed pack. Thin-skinned and quick, and much straighter grown up a frame.
D.T. Brown Cucumber Long Green, 50 seed pack. The old-fashioned one, and it needs the height more than most.
D.T. Brown Tomato Grosse Lisse, 75 seed pack. It keeps growing all season, so it wants tying to something all season.
Diggers Eco In-Ground Timber Protecta 4L. For the cut ends of any timber going into the soil.
Martins Organic Sugar Cane Bale 11kg. Mulch the base, because nothing is shading that soil once the crop has gone up instead of across.

Did you know we also stock the treated pine trellis panels themselves in store, along with fibre lattice, hardwood and bamboo garden stakes, plastic-coated steel stakes, jute and sisal garden twine, cable ties, and seed for climbing bean Purple King, pea Greenfeast, Sugarsnap and snow pea. None of that is on the website, so give us a ring on (08) 8536 4333 to check what is on the shelf.

A 2.4m panel is not going in the back of a hatchback, so we deliver. It's $5 around Strathalbyn and $10 on the regional run, Tuesdays and Thursdays, on anything you've bought from us. Local delivery.

The rest of it is in the garden centre, which is where I'd start if you're not sure yet, because you can stand in front of it and ask.