How To Make A DIY Teepee Trellis

There are so many different kinds of trellis’ you can make to get your veggies up off the ground. Pinterest is FULL of ideas from free all the way to spending a couple hundred dollars.

When I started looking into a trellis system for our cucumbers, the plan was to do a fancy arch made out of garden fencing and t-posts. After some thinking, I didn’t think it would work or look right in the area of our yard so we got to brainstorming again. This is where Pinterest came in handy!

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How To Make A DIY Teepee Veggie Trellis

To catch you up to speed if you missed my last blog post, I have been working my butt off trying to get all of my gardens ready and planted. Ok, I only have two gardens but it’s a lot of work! Anyway, I have seen so many options for veggie trellis’ that help get your veggies off the ground and I had to try one!

We moved our raised beds from the very backyard to up closer to the house and I wanted to create an arch made out of garden fencing and t-posts. However, where our beds are in the yard, having a giant arch would have looked kind of silly and not really make much sense. So I was on the search for something different. That’s when I came across the idea of a teepee trellis!

Now, there are so many ways that you can make a teepee trellis with all the fancy bamboo sticks, or man made poles and kits. Us on the other hand, just used what was in our yard.

DIY Teepee Trellis

Here’s what you will need:

7 sturdy branches (ours were 4-5 ft tall)
Twigs and sticks of all sizes to fill gaps
Zip ties
Twine
Scissors
Two people – the extra hands help big time when tying everything!

Here’s what we did:

We took the 7 sturdy branches and set them up so they gave the shape of the teepee. We have ours in our raised bed so they weren’t dug into the ground but deep enough that I was able to push the dirt up around the bottoms.

Next you will take zip ties and zip tie the branches together at the top. If you do not have zip ties, twine works just fine. And yes it looks a little silly but it works and hopefully they vines will cover everything up in time.

We used reusable zip ties so that if we decided to take this down we could reuse them later for another project. Also, they provided much better quality when keeping the branches together. If you do not use reusable zip ties, you can easily cut the ends off to not be seen.

Don’t worry if at this point everything seems kind of loose, once you add the support it will become really sturdy.

Next you are going to start at the bottom with the twigs and sticks to make support and an area for the veggies to attach to as they grow.

This part was pretty easy but also time consuming.

What you’re going to want to do is take the size of the twigs and line them up with the gaps of the branches you put up. Then take twine and tie the twigs to the branches. I used an X method as shown below.

You can tie each end individually, but I put both ends of the twigs and tied them together to save a bit of time and twine.

After everything was done, I planted my cucumbers at the bottom of each of the 7 branches. My goal and hope is that as the cucumber plants grow, they will attach themselves on the branches and the twigs and climb their way to the top.

Side note: I did leave the front side open with no twigs so that as the cucumbers grow, I am able to get into the middle of the trellis and collect anything that grows and hangs.

Also, I planted mainly pickling cucumbers and only two regular cucumbers around this. I don’t think the weight of the cucumbers should be an issue as the trellis is super sturdy with all the support of twigs and twine.

I also think this would be a great trellis for other veggies such as beans or peas. You could also do many varieties of squash with this, however I would make it much bigger with all branches instead of the smaller twigs.

And there you have it, a DIY Teepee Trellis! I hope this was helpful in making your own trellis! Make sure to subscribe so you can see when I update once we have some vine growth in the near future!

Until next time,