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DIY: Cattle Panel Arbor Trellis



Simple, durable, and tall enough to walk through comfortably. My Husband built this trellis for my birthday this year! I promise you, the hardest part of this arched trellis was getting the materials loaded on the trailer and bringing them home.

There are multiple ways you could do this but I focused on trying to keep it a simple afternoon task and we can move it if necessary at the minimal cost of buying more heavy duty zip ties.


Supplies you will need:

- Cattle Panels 16' x 50" (you will need 2 panels to make one 8' wide trellis but you can easily do this with 1 panel as well. I used 4 panels total to make the 2 archways you see in the image.)
- T-Posts (We used 6 of the 7' posts for a little extra stability because I plan to grow heavy plants like gourds and squash over it but you could get away with using 5')
- Heavy Duty Zip Ties (The length isn't a big deal, most zip ties will be long enough but they MUST be Heavy Duty!
- OPTIONAL - T-Post Driver (We decided to buy one to make it easier to stamp the posts in place but depending on how compact your soil is you could probably use a mallet with a board or to make life even easier you could rent a hydraulic post driver but I have zero experience with those!)


Installation was as simple as measuring the area and setting the posts before bending the cattle panels to fit between them and securing in place with 3-4 heavy duty zip ties on each t-post. 
To make them identical to what we have you will need to overlap the panels slightly in the center to create an 8' wide trellis. We set the t-posts 57" apart because this gave us exactly 7' at the tallest point of the archway. My husband is 6'2" and I didn't want him hitting his head on too many gourds, haha. You may need to alter the width because we had to account for the raised bed on one side of the trellis and you may not need as much headroom. This should be decided before setting the t-posts as they are harder to remove than to set in place.


I have plans to fasten plastic sheeting over the trellis in the fall to see if I can utilize it as a small greenhouse next winter! ...To be continued!


Comments

  1. This is an awesome idea! And could be done anywhere!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for an informative post! Question. I was planning on building 3 connecting trellis’s. They would bump up to garden boxes on each side. If I do this though, I will have easy access to pick the veggies from inside the arch, however if I need to pick from the outside I will need to stand in the boxes. Do I need to leave some space then between each trellis or will picking from the inside be sufficient? Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks for the informative post. I built on of these 5 years ago and added a new on this year. You took away the guesswork and saved me a bunch of time and frustration!

    ReplyDelete
  4. I think I would use them for a mini-hoop house over my 4x4 square foot garden beds. perfect actually.

    ReplyDelete

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