Treellis

I like making things for my garden and I like things that look natural. That's one of the reasons that I like the rope corrals. I often use old branches for supports around the garden, too. I especially like the branches that have a lot of lichen on them. It just gives the garden a lot of extra interest.

We had a storm a few weeks back that knocked a very large branch off our tree. We were actually quite lucky; many of our neighbors lost trees and this branch just missed landing on our neighbors house (not that it was that big, but it could have done some damage). Instead of chopping it up for fire wood or taking it to the compost site, I saw a new project. We had bought a climbing rose at the beginning of spring and it was itching to climb something. So we cut the branch into two pieces of equal size. I siliconed the bottom 2 feet of each of the branches for waterproofing (we'll see if that works I guess) and we sunk them into the ground next to our patio. We sunk them between 18" and 2' deep with base gravel (decomposed limestone- for drainage to keep water from sitting against the wood and rotting it) and dirt (because we ran out of decomposed limestone). Then using some heavy gauge galvanized wire, we wired the smaller branches of the two large pieces together to make one strong piece. We planted the rose in the middle and voilà! Now we have a very natural looking trellis.

You can see the nice lichen on the branches, and once the rose fills out, I think that this will look very nice. It has already been through three other very windy storms and didn't even budge, so I think we are in business. Now if only my rose survives the winter...