My grandma used to have an old wooden ladder in the middle of her cucumber patch and it only took me another 35 years to see the genius of it. I have a long strip of farm-able area at my house and the cucumbers, watermelons and pumpkins overtake their boundaries as if they don’t care about aesthetics of gardening. I have even had them climb up the fence between my garden and the neighbor’s yard and work their way into her trees, leaving surprising dangling pumpkins in her apple tree. I finally put two and two together and realized grandma was doing three things with that old ladder: growing her vines UP, keeping the ‘cukes off the ground and out of the sun!
Apparently this genius is not lost on the rest of the world and lots of people build trellises.. (trelli?) for their cucumbers too. I even found one person that used an old bedspring for hers and it works great:
Unfortunately I was not able to find any suitable recyclable bedspring sets laying around the area so I headed to Home Depot for some 2x3s, concrete reinforcement mesh and a couple strap hinges. I stapled the mesh to the boards, connected them at the top with hinges and voila: Perfect cheapo cucumber trellis! It should give the cucumbers something to climb up instead of over, and the cucumbers can dangle in the middle out of the sun and off the dirt!
