Need more garden space but don’t have much room? Consider vertical gardening.
Quite a few plants gardeners like are vining/climbing plants that take up a ton of ground space. In some areas that is fine but they are also hard to harvest and sit in the moist soil with the slugs. reducing yield.
Do any web search on the benefits of vertical gardening and you will find a ton of great information. While we have plenty of room, we want to be efficient with a small footprint and promote healthier plants to get an overall higher harvest yield. As a bonus, they look great when the plants mature.
However, DO NOT go to Home Depot and pick up a bunch of commercially manufactured garden trellis at an average price of $30 per 2 x 4 panel. Instead, consider calf or cattle panel. This stuff is inexpensive. A sixteen by four-foot panel is $23 at Tractor Supply Co.
Although you can get more bang for your buck with a sixteen-foot panel – you do have to be a bit creative getting them home. You can get eight-foot panels to do straight or triangular style trellis, but if you want a hoop trellis, you need the sixteen-foot panels.
Pick up a couple of 5 foot T-posts and some zip ties and you are ready to go! Space them so you can plant on either size (ours are about five foot between the two arch sides. Drive in the T-post, arch the panel, and zip tie to the post.
For our first hoop trellis – we used four old T-posts that we had lying around, these are about $3.50 each if you bought them new – and then added two sixteen-foot panels at $46.00. With the addition of about 20 zip ties we probably have $55 invested in the trellis. Far better than if we tried to use commercial garden bed trellis.
panels zip tied to t-posts 
panels zip tied to t-posts 
Snap Peas
On our first set of trellis, we have Cucumbers and Snap peas planted. We are adding another full-raised bed length hoop trellis that will support our vine tomatoes, pole beans, loofa, and maybe the zucchini if we have space leftover from the tomatoes.
One thing about tomatoes. Not all varieties will vine and climb. Indeterminate varieties (most cherry, beefsteak, brandywines, etc) will train well to a vine, but determinate varieties (Roma, and anything with “bush” in the name )will not. For a good reference, this is an excellent tomato variety chart by Portland Nursery: 2020 Tomatoes.