Support your local vegetables!

05/22/2002
Support your local vegetables!

I love vining vegetables: sweet, crisp Sugar Snap peas in their original, tall-climbing and high-producing version; succulent, meaty flat-podded pole beans; fresh shell beans in all their delicious variety; tiny cornichon cucumbers for pickling with tarragon and white wine vinegar.

But until this year, providing the necessary support for my climbing vegetables was always my most dreaded task--and often one that I procrastinated until the vines were already verging on becoming a tangled mess. As any gardener who's grown them knows, a mass of climbing vegetable plants is extremely heavy and needs sturdy support. In my garden back in the States, I used to pound metal fence posts into the ground and string farm fencing along them. Hard and heavy work, pounding posts and then struggling to uncoil and stretch metal fencing taut between them!

No more of that for me. In my search for unusual French gardening products to offer you on this site, I have come across perhaps the most ingenious of all: a system of simple plant supports modeled on vining plants' own means of climbing by tendrils and twining. These variously formed supports--made of dark green, flexible yet strong PCV about the thickness of heavy-gauge wire--transform lightweight bamboo canes into an extremely strong and attractive trellis, in minutes, and nearly effortlessly. The trellis for my Oregon Sugar Pod II peas, pictured above, took all of 15 minutes for me to construct. And it is extremely strong, thanks to the spring-like tension of the PVC clips.



As you can see in the photo above, these garden clips have an ingenious, assymetric, tendril sort of form that is unbelievably versatile. You can connect two or even three lengths of bamboo in an almost limitless array of configurations with a single clip. Used in concert, a collection of these clips can be used to make a zig-zag support for perennials, a fan-shaped trellis for a clematis or rose, a handsome support for a vine in a pot... There's literally no limit to their capabilities. Several other forms are available too. Some enable you to support your top-heavy peppers, tomatoes, eggplants--you name it--just as effortlessly. Others are adapted to the perennial garden or to the training of climbing plants such as roses, bougainvilleas, and clematis. Check out the shopping page under the category "Tools and accessories--Plant supports, twines, and ties" to see the full collection of these great gardening aids. As my friend from the South would say, they're the best thing since sliced bread!

Share

Products of Interest:
'Jardin' modular clips for bamboo
Apache clips for bamboo teepee
Cobra clip
Butterfly plant clips--small