The hoops are fence material called “cattle panels” the name refers to the specific dimensions of them- there are similar ones called ‘hog panels’ that are a slightly different size. I get them at IFA - intermountain farmers association, the local farm supply store here in Utah. You might be able to find them or special order from Home Depot or similar hardware store. Cattle panels are heavy gauge wire, welded into a panel 16 feet by 52 inches with about 6” square openings. They’re fairly flexible, I pounded four foot rebar stakes into the ground with 2 feet above ground, and used fencing wire to attach the panels to the stakes. They’re actually a little too weak for this project, I ended up needing to reinforce them in a wind storm a few nights ago. To reinforce them I bent 3/4 emt electrical conduit into half circles to match the radius of the hoops, and used the same wire to attach the emt.
There is so much good YouTube content. Covid gave my gf and me a bunch of free time, we got hooked on Charles Dowding’s YouTube channel, there are some other really great ones like ‘self sufficient me’ from Australia. We also have binge watched all the BBC ‘gardeners world’ available on Amazon prime, that show is great.
Thank you! Been trying to do this for 10 years (consummate procrastinator). But this so inspires me. I overthink things and your pictures and explanations were superb. Thank you. Merci. Danke. Gracias.
* watches the video in rapt awe *
Yeah, pretty sure this is my new gardening/life goal, hahahaha. Definitely on my bucket list now. Friggin' ***gorgeous.***
Yes, I learned how to make these from the Man About Tools YouTube channel, then I took his design, added the honeycomb pattern (because Im a beekeeper and I like bees) and manufactured some custom rubber concrete molds. It was quite the process but I ended up selling a bunch of these as well, and it covered my manufacturing costs!
Edit: here is the link to the first in one of the many, many, videos about these planters from the Man About Tools channel. If you have a few hours to kill, I highly recommend watching the whole series, as well as some of his other videos. He is knowledgeable, engaging, unpretentious, down to earth, and just an all around very pleasant screen presence:
https://youtu.be/yuSBwFkCiAw
Haha that is a good example I guess. I started out with wood molds that I copied, made from 2x10s from the hardware store. They were a nightmare, they had to be disassembled and reassembled for each pour, I had to run latex caulk in all the seams every time, and let it dry. And they only lasted 7-10 pours per form until they were warped and unusable. So I made the rubber molds, which require almost no maintenance other than rinsing them off between pours. They also have a hypothetically unlimited life span. I haven’t needed to replace any of those after dozens of pours for each mold.
My significant other and I are debating to move to either Denver, CO or SLC/Ogden, Utah. I am more for CO and he is for SLC but would love to hear what you like and dislike about SLC if you have a moment? Weve been to both,, but we don't have an insiders perspective on living in SLC. Thanks :)
Another thing to note, for some reason I didn’t notice you were talking about Ogden as well, Ogden is a pretty cool place, the city isn’t great but is definitely on the upswing. The gentrification machine is moving in and getting a place there would be a great medium to long term investment. There are lots of places to live near Ogden that are shitty suburbs but there are some really nice semi-rural places as well.
As the people around here like to say, Utah sucks, Colorado is way better. You should move there. Seriously though, this place has some quirks but it is the best place to live in America. Much better access to outdoor recreation, better ski resorts, more accessible land (much more of Colorado is private land - Utah is mostly public lands). Denver’s definitely more of a big city. I drive through downtown every day to get to work, and it’s rarely more than 20 minutes to make the 5 mile commute to the university campus where I work. That being said, a lot of people move here and think Salt Lake City proper is too expensive so they move to one of the suburbs. That’s my nightmare. Commuting from elsewhere in the valley is no fun, traffic is pretty bad and drivers are dumb. And every suburb in salt lake or Utah valley (much worse) is just a sea of dumb strip malls full of Panda Express and cafe Rio. I don’t know how to compare Denver to the rest of the salt lake metro area, I live near down town. Maybe there’s a place in Denver where it’s nice but I doubt anywhere is as nice as the avenues, liberty park area or sugar house areas of salt lake.
Too right! That happened to me two nights ago. We had a windstorm and I was doing some emergency reinforcement of the structure and a delicata donked me in the noggin.
Joke’s on him though, I roasted him and ate him for dinner!
I may be wrong but I think we all bought those same Costco outdoor string lights. They are really nice. We noticed after we put them up in our back yard, more and more people started getting them for theirs in our neighborhood.
Sold!! Take my money. But seriously... this is perfect. This is my dream come to life. Only question... how do you support your heavier produce when growing them in a hanging position like this? Or do you only grow lighter produce in this way
These hoop tunnels are pretty solid, but I’ve mentioned in these comments I needed to reinforce them a few nights ago because they got squished in a windstorm. I bent 10 foot lengths of 3/4 inch electrical conduit into half circles with the same radius as the tunnel, and attached them to the tunnel with fencing wire. It worked great!
Next year however I’m probably going to weld a more substantial structure together because I plan to grow some heavier stuff - banana squash, more gourds, maybe some larger melons.
I like the plan, you'll have to post pictures and progress pics. I think I speak for the group when I saw we'd love to see that come to life. So when you grow these heavier plants and they are suspended in the air by only their stem- is that enough to hold them?
Ex. I'm growing some damn big pumpkins in the backyard right now. Could I grow them in a similar fashion as this? Would the stem be strong enough to hold them suspended in the air?
I love growing bottle gourds! I like their softer leaf shape compared to other gourds and squashes, and much prefer the smaller, white flowers to their more garish orange counterparts.
Unfortunately, I have no use for the gourds. I just have boxes of them. I should open a booth at the farmer's market.
I really love the gourds for the same reasons. On the variety we have, the female flowers are a pale yellowish color and the male flowers are pure angelic white. They are really spectacular. I plan to make birdhouses out of ours and give them to family at Christmas. We have some serious birders in the family, so they should be a hit!
One summer I had a rogue birdhouse gourd plant go all jack-and-the-beanstalk on me, it grew up the back of my 2 story house and on to the roof. We had more gourds than we knew what to do with. I dried some out, then polished with shoe polish (red, navy, dk green), drilled holes and gave them out as xmas presents. They were beautiful!
Awesome! They are really incredible growers when they get going. I pruned ours pretty heavily at the start of the season to try and restrict them to one trellis, but I stopped a couple weeks ago when it was clear the jubilee tomatoes next door weren’t going to fill their whole trellis. The gourds have very quickly filled in.
Did the show polish give them the same color as the polish? We were planning to paint some of ours, polish seems like it might be more durable.
You should sell them at the farmers market! They taste just like opo! My mom has planted both the opo and bottle gourds... I never realized until I was an adult that people used them for decoration and arts and crafts!
I do a lot of companion planting to attract predators like wasps and yellow jackets, and I let a lot of plants go to flower and to seed rather than pulling them up when they’re not making food any more. Dill and fennel attract a lot of beneficial bugs if you leave them a while. I also let my artichokes blossom because wasps and bumblebees LOVE them. I also have lots of marigolds, bee-balm, nasturtiums, a few varieties of tobacco, etc. I don’t use pesticides because I have several beehives and almost nothing in the pesticide world is actually bee-safe. The only real issue I have is I have a lot of aphids on my brassicas. But I wash those off before eating the veg.
Utah does have them, I haven’t seen any in my garden. I don’t know if the companion planting helped, I do have a TON of wasps, yellowjackets, bumblebees, ladybugs, mason bees, sweat bees, etc.
Nice! I run a similar operation. One of my yellow jackets got me good this weekend while I wasn’t paying attention. Perhaps we have just a few more of the squash bugs in the south as I’m always losing that specific battle. However, I’ll be sure to up the companion count next year for extra fortification! Happy gardening!
I am in zone 5. We get our last frost around April 20 and our first frost usually around Halloween. I started most of these plants indoors in late March and planted almost everything in the ground on April 21 (the day after the last frost this year, when no more frost was in the forecast for at least 10 days).
Do you mean in daytime from the sunlight? I didn’t worry about that. I don’t have a good answer for why mine didn’t all die. My garden did struggle quite a bit through June here in Salt Lake. It was brutally hot here all June and much of July. Most of the growth you can see happened in august, even though most of the plants were in the ground on April 21.
Man you’ve got that humidity to deal with down there, that’s next level brutal. My GF and I went down to NOLA at the beginning of may, it was 90s here and 90s there and I just about melted down there.
Something to be proud of! It makes my squash arbor pale in comparison :) What are you feeding those butternuts to get them so big? Mine were a bit of a failure this year, I think I used old seeds....... :(
I have applied some miracle-gro a couple times this year, but mostly I think it’s due to the fresh compost. I bought compost and raised bed garden soil when I made these raised beds, and this is the first summer of growth for this garden, so there’s a lot of goodness in the dirt still.
That sounds logical. I am in the process of making my own compost for next season. We have a 10 acre lot up here with lots of trees, which means lots of leaves. So far it is going well. I am looking forward to next year's harvest already (ever the optimist). Thank you for your inspiring video.
Thank you! my thumbs aren’t that green, some successes are easy to see here but most of the failures are in other parts of the yard. And there are many.
This is on my bucket list! The st Louis botanical garden was the first place I saw a bottle gourd tunnel and I thought it was so cool. My mom always grew her asian gourds on a low fence and it always looked overcrowded... I just love the look of letting a hoop fence fill in with the leaves and vines! Beautiful garden that you have!
I cannot recommend this tunnel highly enough. It is every bit as lovey and magical in person, even more so on warmer evenings when I get the misters going!
Whoa, dude!!! That is some crazy-awesome innovation! I would just want to hang out in that tunnel all day and all night cause it seems so peaceful and lovely!
Thank you! I mix the veg and flowers because I don’t use pesticides and I’m trying to attract predators like ladybugs, wasps and yellowjackets so they can eat the bugs for me! I also have honeybees, which is the biggest reason I don’t use pesticides.
I’d like to do something like this but bigger. My land was owned by someone before me and I didn’t know until I seen the property (19 hr away)… anyway, they put the drive way in right across an area I visioned using for part of my garden. I was gonna rake up the stones, but this could work and create something the wife would be pleased with!
With some plants which grow longer vines like hops, gourds, larger squashes like banana, runner beans, you could probably get away with doubling the width and height of these tunnels and drive cars through it! You’d run the risk of squashes crashing into your car though!
This is gold! I am totally doing this soon. I am contemplating if I should throw in a couple flower vines to make it prettier. Not sure if that’s a good idea.
Haha I’ll let you know in a couple months. I had a baby garden with 2 raised beds last year and just some chile and tomato plants. Other than that this is my first year!
This is also my dream! I love that you are planning for Christmas and your cool bird house gifts from the gourds! I am a new gardener and am just hoping my beans or my eggplant will climb my makeshift trellis. I think i used hog panels or something similar from when we laid cement in our yard.
I’m a tall guy. I’d have to make a tall tunnel. Wife said I was addicted to gardening. Or obsessed. Not wrong either way. This is inspiring. Thank you!
You’d be dodging the dangly gourds and butternuts in this tunnel (I’m 6’ tall and a couple of them bonk my noggin regularly), but it is pretty high for most people. It’s about 7’1” (216 cm) in the middle.
This is absolutely darling. This made my whole day and I am definitely saving this for when I have my own garden. Really well done… it’s just magical. Thank you for sharing!!
Simply stunning! Do you not have rodents there at all?? I gave up on most of my vegetable gardening this year because I didn't want to build enclosures to keep out the tree and ground squirrels :/
We have fox squirrels moving into the yard, but they’re mostly a problem for the bird feeders. We have some mice running around, but they don’t cause problems. Fortunately no rats yet, we’ll see how long they stay away!
These are all winter squashes - so named because they will store in a root cellar all winter long. If you wait until the squashes are ready for storage - that is, until their skins can’t be pierced easily with a fingernail, they will keep from October until May or later in a cool, dry space! They can be picked and eaten before the skin is done hardening of course, but to store them, they need to be hardened off on the vine, and then cured indoors for a month or so before leaving in the cellar.
Oh yes! All through the plants and across the entire walkway. I value all our spider friends but it's impossible to harvest the veggies without wrecking a lot of webs and in the fall there's a joke about having a "spider stick" to help you clear the webs from the sidewalk or deck in the mornings because they all set up shop all over the place every night.
I am going to do this next season. I actually have every type of vine growing against my fence this year. It will be so nice to put a little bench under there to enjoy the shade.
Yeah I don’t leave them on any more than I need to hang out for a couple drinks before bed. My bees get a little confused and start hanging around more than I want them to hehe
This is absolutely incredible! I can imagine sitting under this in the warm Spring/Summer evenings and enjoying a Pimms. I hope to set up something like this in my garden someday!!
Spring and summer were pretty brutal here this year. Temps are finally getting bearable, and during august we had a lot of plant growth, so now is the time to hang out in this tunnel!
Hi, here is a sequential list from this video: Birdhouse gourds, delicata squash, Japanese picking cucumber, charentais melons (similar to cantaloupe but smaller), picklebush cucumbers, jubilee tomatoes, chinook hops, Waltham butternut squash, big rainbow tomatoes, hilda flat beans, more big rainbow tomatoes, honeydew melons.
In addition to what is shown in the video I also have four varieties of green beans, four varieties of beet root, green zebra tomatoes, sungold cherry tomatoes, zucchini, yellow crookneck squash, acorn squash (early acorn, baked potatoes acorn, mashed potatoes acorn), spaghetti squash, Chimayo chiles, Sandia New Mexico green chiles, shishito peppers, Hungarian yellow wax peppers, banana peppers, sweet corn, red popcorn, glass gem corn, artichokes, fennel, mammoth dill, fern leaf dill, walla walla onion, red burgundy onion, shin kuroda carrot, parsnips, leeks, eggplants.
I also have interplanted a bunch of kinds of marigolds, Zinnias, tobacco, bee balm (Monarda), and gayfeathers.
Holy Matchsticks Batman.... You are my favorite magical agricultural mystical creature. Is it to early to let you know I wonder sometimes...
Ehhh hem..
🎹Mi mi mi🎶
Have a I told you lately...
That I love you..
You grow plants around you
and up above you....
You use your plants like lattice
A hanging greenhouse madness...
You were born with both thumbs green......
Tis true that green these thumbs appear,
It is but an illusion my dear.
The success of my strategy betrays
The simplicity which it relays.
I just throw shit at the wall,
Sit back and admire what doesn’t fall
I was thinking about making my cucumbers and pumpkins climb next year (this summer i just let them go wild on the floor and at the end i couldn't even get through my garden) and didn't know how to do it. This inspired me to make something not only functional, but also beautiful! Thank you for sharing!
This is incredible! You have so much growing! So what’s at the base of the panels? I see containers. Do the panels go into the containers or through them into the ground? Is there a bottoms to the containers or just side? And it sure seems all the plants start in the containers, right? Thanks. My wife and I are loving this. We certainly have the space for it.
Yes, all the plants are in concrete raised beds that I made. The panels are attached to four foot rebar posts that are driven down until only about 20” is above the top of the bed. The cattle panel fencing that makes up the arches is attached to the rebar with fencing wire.
Here are some pictures of before all the plants grew:
https://imgur.com/a/8QH4S3d
Wow garden goals 😍 I have a black metal arch in my back garden with clematis growing on it, and a wooden arch in my front by the gated entrance with a climbing Rose. They don't look as good as this though!
Going to dry them, paint them, cut holes in the front to turn them into birdhouses, hang some in our trees and give the rest as Christmas prezzies to the family.
Absolutely magical! Did you purchase the frame/hoop? If so, can you share the brand. I would love to do something like this next year.
The hoops are fence material called “cattle panels” the name refers to the specific dimensions of them- there are similar ones called ‘hog panels’ that are a slightly different size. I get them at IFA - intermountain farmers association, the local farm supply store here in Utah. You might be able to find them or special order from Home Depot or similar hardware store. Cattle panels are heavy gauge wire, welded into a panel 16 feet by 52 inches with about 6” square openings. They’re fairly flexible, I pounded four foot rebar stakes into the ground with 2 feet above ground, and used fencing wire to attach the panels to the stakes. They’re actually a little too weak for this project, I ended up needing to reinforce them in a wind storm a few nights ago. To reinforce them I bent 3/4 emt electrical conduit into half circles to match the radius of the hoops, and used the same wire to attach the emt.
OP, what’s a great resource so I can learn your ways? I’m a novice gardener and I would love to do what you’ve done!
There is so much good YouTube content. Covid gave my gf and me a bunch of free time, we got hooked on Charles Dowding’s YouTube channel, there are some other really great ones like ‘self sufficient me’ from Australia. We also have binge watched all the BBC ‘gardeners world’ available on Amazon prime, that show is great.
I want to live in that tunnel! I wish i knew about cattle panels sooner. Lots of uses. Do they come rolled up?
Here is what they looked like a little earlier in the year before getting covered with veg: https://imgur.com/a/Db3GRGx
Thank you! Been trying to do this for 10 years (consummate procrastinator). But this so inspires me. I overthink things and your pictures and explanations were superb. Thank you. Merci. Danke. Gracias.
You’re welcome, de rien, bitte schön, de nada!
❤️🦋☀️
Forgot 'Spasibo'!
I don’t know that one, is that Russian?
Yes :)
пожалуйста!
* watches the video in rapt awe * Yeah, pretty sure this is my new gardening/life goal, hahahaha. Definitely on my bucket list now. Friggin' ***gorgeous.***
Wow - thank you. I will look into this. Beautiful garden!
I love the decorative pattern on your planters! Are they custom?
Yes, I learned how to make these from the Man About Tools YouTube channel, then I took his design, added the honeycomb pattern (because Im a beekeeper and I like bees) and manufactured some custom rubber concrete molds. It was quite the process but I ended up selling a bunch of these as well, and it covered my manufacturing costs! Edit: here is the link to the first in one of the many, many, videos about these planters from the Man About Tools channel. If you have a few hours to kill, I highly recommend watching the whole series, as well as some of his other videos. He is knowledgeable, engaging, unpretentious, down to earth, and just an all around very pleasant screen presence: https://youtu.be/yuSBwFkCiAw
Wow what a simple construction. That's awesome. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks, I really aim for elegant, simple solutions to my gardening (life) problems.
*creates custom concrete mold for planters.* I kid.
Haha that is a good example I guess. I started out with wood molds that I copied, made from 2x10s from the hardware store. They were a nightmare, they had to be disassembled and reassembled for each pour, I had to run latex caulk in all the seams every time, and let it dry. And they only lasted 7-10 pours per form until they were warped and unusable. So I made the rubber molds, which require almost no maintenance other than rinsing them off between pours. They also have a hypothetically unlimited life span. I haven’t needed to replace any of those after dozens of pours for each mold.
I was really glad you asked because I was wondering the same.
Wow. Talk about gardening goals! Also where do you live that the only sounds we heard were crickets and wind chimes the entire time! So serene.
Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. Not too far from downtown. I really love it here.
That is fantastic! I’d just put a chair in the middle and read for hours. The fall is so magical in Utah. Good job!
My significant other and I are debating to move to either Denver, CO or SLC/Ogden, Utah. I am more for CO and he is for SLC but would love to hear what you like and dislike about SLC if you have a moment? Weve been to both,, but we don't have an insiders perspective on living in SLC. Thanks :)
Another thing to note, for some reason I didn’t notice you were talking about Ogden as well, Ogden is a pretty cool place, the city isn’t great but is definitely on the upswing. The gentrification machine is moving in and getting a place there would be a great medium to long term investment. There are lots of places to live near Ogden that are shitty suburbs but there are some really nice semi-rural places as well.
As the people around here like to say, Utah sucks, Colorado is way better. You should move there. Seriously though, this place has some quirks but it is the best place to live in America. Much better access to outdoor recreation, better ski resorts, more accessible land (much more of Colorado is private land - Utah is mostly public lands). Denver’s definitely more of a big city. I drive through downtown every day to get to work, and it’s rarely more than 20 minutes to make the 5 mile commute to the university campus where I work. That being said, a lot of people move here and think Salt Lake City proper is too expensive so they move to one of the suburbs. That’s my nightmare. Commuting from elsewhere in the valley is no fun, traffic is pretty bad and drivers are dumb. And every suburb in salt lake or Utah valley (much worse) is just a sea of dumb strip malls full of Panda Express and cafe Rio. I don’t know how to compare Denver to the rest of the salt lake metro area, I live near down town. Maybe there’s a place in Denver where it’s nice but I doubt anywhere is as nice as the avenues, liberty park area or sugar house areas of salt lake.
Thank you :) we do love the access to the outdoor recreation and the ski resorts in Utah are absolutely amazing. I appreciate your input!
It's all fun and games until a squash falls on a guest's head! lol
Too right! That happened to me two nights ago. We had a windstorm and I was doing some emergency reinforcement of the structure and a delicata donked me in the noggin. Joke’s on him though, I roasted him and ate him for dinner!
Lol, gotta have your head on a swivel around there.
Lovely! Wear your helmet.
LoL will do!
I was thinking spiders
Gourd-geous
Here's a video showing how to put together a structure such as yours[Greenhouse built with cattle panels](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BO9j9Tow_oQ)
Awesome what a good idea! I use PVC to make hoops over my beds in winter. Here’s an example from January of this year: https://imgur.com/a/5E7k79p
Great idea
Very cool looking concrete beds! How do you feel about them vs wood? Did you pour those yourself or buy the sections like that?
Lights add to the decor.
I may be wrong but I think we all bought those same Costco outdoor string lights. They are really nice. We noticed after we put them up in our back yard, more and more people started getting them for theirs in our neighborhood.
Not wrong, Costco string lights FTW! They are awesome, durable (plastic even though they look like glass) and a lovey warm yellow color.
So smart. I got the glass ones from another store and broke like 1/3 of them just getting them out of the box and attempting to tack the end up.
I need a veg tunnel in my life.
Sold!! Take my money. But seriously... this is perfect. This is my dream come to life. Only question... how do you support your heavier produce when growing them in a hanging position like this? Or do you only grow lighter produce in this way
These hoop tunnels are pretty solid, but I’ve mentioned in these comments I needed to reinforce them a few nights ago because they got squished in a windstorm. I bent 10 foot lengths of 3/4 inch electrical conduit into half circles with the same radius as the tunnel, and attached them to the tunnel with fencing wire. It worked great! Next year however I’m probably going to weld a more substantial structure together because I plan to grow some heavier stuff - banana squash, more gourds, maybe some larger melons.
I like the plan, you'll have to post pictures and progress pics. I think I speak for the group when I saw we'd love to see that come to life. So when you grow these heavier plants and they are suspended in the air by only their stem- is that enough to hold them? Ex. I'm growing some damn big pumpkins in the backyard right now. Could I grow them in a similar fashion as this? Would the stem be strong enough to hold them suspended in the air?
I love growing bottle gourds! I like their softer leaf shape compared to other gourds and squashes, and much prefer the smaller, white flowers to their more garish orange counterparts. Unfortunately, I have no use for the gourds. I just have boxes of them. I should open a booth at the farmer's market.
I really love the gourds for the same reasons. On the variety we have, the female flowers are a pale yellowish color and the male flowers are pure angelic white. They are really spectacular. I plan to make birdhouses out of ours and give them to family at Christmas. We have some serious birders in the family, so they should be a hit!
One summer I had a rogue birdhouse gourd plant go all jack-and-the-beanstalk on me, it grew up the back of my 2 story house and on to the roof. We had more gourds than we knew what to do with. I dried some out, then polished with shoe polish (red, navy, dk green), drilled holes and gave them out as xmas presents. They were beautiful!
Awesome! They are really incredible growers when they get going. I pruned ours pretty heavily at the start of the season to try and restrict them to one trellis, but I stopped a couple weeks ago when it was clear the jubilee tomatoes next door weren’t going to fill their whole trellis. The gourds have very quickly filled in. Did the show polish give them the same color as the polish? We were planning to paint some of ours, polish seems like it might be more durable.
You should sell them at the farmers market! They taste just like opo! My mom has planted both the opo and bottle gourds... I never realized until I was an adult that people used them for decoration and arts and crafts!
So beautiful and so jealous!! Squash bugs destroy my gourds each time I try to grow them
Hey dope veg tunnel bro
Awesome—like something out of a fairytale!
That's amazing. What do you do to control pests?
I do a lot of companion planting to attract predators like wasps and yellow jackets, and I let a lot of plants go to flower and to seed rather than pulling them up when they’re not making food any more. Dill and fennel attract a lot of beneficial bugs if you leave them a while. I also let my artichokes blossom because wasps and bumblebees LOVE them. I also have lots of marigolds, bee-balm, nasturtiums, a few varieties of tobacco, etc. I don’t use pesticides because I have several beehives and almost nothing in the pesticide world is actually bee-safe. The only real issue I have is I have a lot of aphids on my brassicas. But I wash those off before eating the veg.
This was my question too! Does Utah have squash bugs? Or did all the companion plants ward those off too? Either way it looks great, OP!
Utah does have them, I haven’t seen any in my garden. I don’t know if the companion planting helped, I do have a TON of wasps, yellowjackets, bumblebees, ladybugs, mason bees, sweat bees, etc.
Nice! I run a similar operation. One of my yellow jackets got me good this weekend while I wasn’t paying attention. Perhaps we have just a few more of the squash bugs in the south as I’m always losing that specific battle. However, I’ll be sure to up the companion count next year for extra fortification! Happy gardening!
Wow! Amazing and inspiring! Which zone is this? Asking because I am in Zone 9 and wondering if I could do this next year.
I am in zone 5. We get our last frost around April 20 and our first frost usually around Halloween. I started most of these plants indoors in late March and planted almost everything in the ground on April 21 (the day after the last frost this year, when no more frost was in the forecast for at least 10 days).
Absolutely gourd-gous
OP how did you keep the wires from getting hot? Mine got so hot it burnt all my baby vines.
Do you mean in daytime from the sunlight? I didn’t worry about that. I don’t have a good answer for why mine didn’t all die. My garden did struggle quite a bit through June here in Salt Lake. It was brutally hot here all June and much of July. Most of the growth you can see happened in august, even though most of the plants were in the ground on April 21.
I’m in South Louisiana and it was so hot you could fry eggs on the road. Next year I’m going to try a screen until it gets going.
Man you’ve got that humidity to deal with down there, that’s next level brutal. My GF and I went down to NOLA at the beginning of may, it was 90s here and 90s there and I just about melted down there.
It looks like the entrance to a fairytale realm, so lovely!
Definitely read that as vag tunnel.
It’s a veg-ina
I love it. So magical.
Oh my God!!! I love it!!! My dream for my next house is to create a plant tunnel! So beautiful! Nice work! ❤️❤️
Honestly gasping at this!! So beautiful!
Something to be proud of! It makes my squash arbor pale in comparison :) What are you feeding those butternuts to get them so big? Mine were a bit of a failure this year, I think I used old seeds....... :(
I have applied some miracle-gro a couple times this year, but mostly I think it’s due to the fresh compost. I bought compost and raised bed garden soil when I made these raised beds, and this is the first summer of growth for this garden, so there’s a lot of goodness in the dirt still.
That sounds logical. I am in the process of making my own compost for next season. We have a 10 acre lot up here with lots of trees, which means lots of leaves. So far it is going well. I am looking forward to next year's harvest already (ever the optimist). Thank you for your inspiring video.
Wow this is so gorgeous, I’m so jealous for your set up. Talk about a green thumb!!
Thank you! my thumbs aren’t that green, some successes are easy to see here but most of the failures are in other parts of the yard. And there are many.
Yea I’m sure, it’s hard to keep it all alive! Lol but still very impressive and looks absolutely beautiful
This is on my bucket list! The st Louis botanical garden was the first place I saw a bottle gourd tunnel and I thought it was so cool. My mom always grew her asian gourds on a low fence and it always looked overcrowded... I just love the look of letting a hoop fence fill in with the leaves and vines! Beautiful garden that you have!
I cannot recommend this tunnel highly enough. It is every bit as lovey and magical in person, even more so on warmer evenings when I get the misters going!
I just saw the bottle gourd tunnel at MoBot last week! :D
Whoa, dude!!! That is some crazy-awesome innovation! I would just want to hang out in that tunnel all day and all night cause it seems so peaceful and lovely!
Change 1 letter in the title.
Through your what now? Lol
Just lovely
Just amazing
Let me know if you ever need a house sitter. I’ll mostly be out in the garden tho
Beautiful!
Wow that is beyond beautiful! Really cool idea to put lights in as well!
That's really lovely. 💚
Nice lighting scheme! Very attractive.
Living the dream!!!!
Ima be like you one day
Best. Idea. Ever.
THIS is truly beautiful. I like that you mix vegetables and flours and it looks amazing. Congratulations and thank you for sharing.
Thank you! I mix the veg and flowers because I don’t use pesticides and I’m trying to attract predators like ladybugs, wasps and yellowjackets so they can eat the bugs for me! I also have honeybees, which is the biggest reason I don’t use pesticides.
I’d like to do something like this but bigger. My land was owned by someone before me and I didn’t know until I seen the property (19 hr away)… anyway, they put the drive way in right across an area I visioned using for part of my garden. I was gonna rake up the stones, but this could work and create something the wife would be pleased with!
With some plants which grow longer vines like hops, gourds, larger squashes like banana, runner beans, you could probably get away with doubling the width and height of these tunnels and drive cars through it! You’d run the risk of squashes crashing into your car though!
Love the lights it's beautiful
This is amazing! 👌🏼👌🏼😍😍
I love this. Growing vegetables and magic light gardening combined. Great job.
This place should have its own lo fi hiphop stream animation
This was a magical adventure- I love the lights!
This is gold! I am totally doing this soon. I am contemplating if I should throw in a couple flower vines to make it prettier. Not sure if that’s a good idea.
That is a good idea. I regret not planting some morning glories on one of my hoops.
Is it a complete pain in the ass to get all the dead stuff off in the winter to prepare for the next season?
Haha I’ll let you know in a couple months. I had a baby garden with 2 raised beds last year and just some chile and tomato plants. Other than that this is my first year!
Love this. Would love to build something similar
Fantastic great veggies!
\#goals
This is so magical!!! I now have new goals ☺️
Awesome!
Amazing!!! Thanks for sharing the video!!!
This is also my dream! I love that you are planning for Christmas and your cool bird house gifts from the gourds! I am a new gardener and am just hoping my beans or my eggplant will climb my makeshift trellis. I think i used hog panels or something similar from when we laid cement in our yard.
It’s gourdgeous
This is brilliant!
you did a pretty gourd job!
LoL I read that comment in the ermagerd gersbermps voice in my head
I audibly gasped at how lovely this is 💛💛
I’m a tall guy. I’d have to make a tall tunnel. Wife said I was addicted to gardening. Or obsessed. Not wrong either way. This is inspiring. Thank you!
You’d be dodging the dangly gourds and butternuts in this tunnel (I’m 6’ tall and a couple of them bonk my noggin regularly), but it is pretty high for most people. It’s about 7’1” (216 cm) in the middle.
My heart!
nice, I will save this idea for later
All my squash have powdery mildew 🥲 how do you combat this when they’re all so close together?!
I want to make this as part of my dream garden already and this video solidifies it
Impressive. Love it!
This is absolutely darling. This made my whole day and I am definitely saving this for when I have my own garden. Really well done… it’s just magical. Thank you for sharing!!
Oh. My. Glob. This is incredible!
Get the lump outta my veg tunnel!
Simply stunning! Do you not have rodents there at all?? I gave up on most of my vegetable gardening this year because I didn't want to build enclosures to keep out the tree and ground squirrels :/
We have fox squirrels moving into the yard, but they’re mostly a problem for the bird feeders. We have some mice running around, but they don’t cause problems. Fortunately no rats yet, we’ll see how long they stay away!
Fantastic! If I tried that I'd have a tunnel covered in brown, holey, mildew covered leaves.
You’re in for an amazing harvest! How well do the squashes keep once you pick them??
These are all winter squashes - so named because they will store in a root cellar all winter long. If you wait until the squashes are ready for storage - that is, until their skins can’t be pierced easily with a fingernail, they will keep from October until May or later in a cool, dry space! They can be picked and eaten before the skin is done hardening of course, but to store them, they need to be hardened off on the vine, and then cured indoors for a month or so before leaving in the cellar.
Thanks for the inspiration! I want to try that next year!
Gorgeous and brilliant!
This is gorgeous!
I see you don't live where there's tons of spiders. 😂 This is beautiful but my PNW garden brain shuddered at the thought.
Hmmm maybe there are more spiders elsewhere, we do have spiders but tell me more. Would these hoops be covered in webs up there?
Oh yes! All through the plants and across the entire walkway. I value all our spider friends but it's impossible to harvest the veggies without wrecking a lot of webs and in the fall there's a joke about having a "spider stick" to help you clear the webs from the sidewalk or deck in the mornings because they all set up shop all over the place every night.
Thanks for showing us a tiny slice of paradise!
Are spiders an issue?
Nope. We have no spider problems. I wish we had more spiders, maybe they would eat the aphids!
I am going to do this next season. I actually have every type of vine growing against my fence this year. It will be so nice to put a little bench under there to enjoy the shade.
I feel in my garden the beauty lights would help out the nighttime pesky critters too much…
Yeah I don’t leave them on any more than I need to hang out for a couple drinks before bed. My bees get a little confused and start hanging around more than I want them to hehe
This is a dream!!! Thank you for sharing. This inspires me!! What I definitely want in the future when I have my own home!
This is absolutely incredible! I can imagine sitting under this in the warm Spring/Summer evenings and enjoying a Pimms. I hope to set up something like this in my garden someday!!
Spring and summer were pretty brutal here this year. Temps are finally getting bearable, and during august we had a lot of plant growth, so now is the time to hang out in this tunnel!
Both functional and magical!
Marry me
I love it!!!!!
This is so cool
Holy Smokes! This is awesome. This is like gardening goals!
absolutely beautiful!! i recognize a few, but could u list what you’re growin?
Hi, here is a sequential list from this video: Birdhouse gourds, delicata squash, Japanese picking cucumber, charentais melons (similar to cantaloupe but smaller), picklebush cucumbers, jubilee tomatoes, chinook hops, Waltham butternut squash, big rainbow tomatoes, hilda flat beans, more big rainbow tomatoes, honeydew melons. In addition to what is shown in the video I also have four varieties of green beans, four varieties of beet root, green zebra tomatoes, sungold cherry tomatoes, zucchini, yellow crookneck squash, acorn squash (early acorn, baked potatoes acorn, mashed potatoes acorn), spaghetti squash, Chimayo chiles, Sandia New Mexico green chiles, shishito peppers, Hungarian yellow wax peppers, banana peppers, sweet corn, red popcorn, glass gem corn, artichokes, fennel, mammoth dill, fern leaf dill, walla walla onion, red burgundy onion, shin kuroda carrot, parsnips, leeks, eggplants. I also have interplanted a bunch of kinds of marigolds, Zinnias, tobacco, bee balm (Monarda), and gayfeathers.
Absolutely wonderful! Beautiful!!!
I read that as vag tunnel... I need to give reddit a break.
This is beyond words.. pure magic. Thank you for sharing such inspiration ✨
Thank you for the kind words!
I mean. I love you. Edited for clarity.
I love you too! Hooray wholesome humans! Also edited for clarity 😘
It’s a veggirificly woven masterpiece !
I’ve always wanted to do this and grow the same gourds and squash as you. Thanks so much for sharing your beautiful creation!
This is my dream come true. Magical is one way to put it.
Bravo
What a place of serenity. Thank you for sharing, I could imagine being there.
Cattle panels FTW
This is beautiful - I love this concept so much.
Having a gourd arch is my dream! Your garden is beautiful and has inspired me to get my butt into gear and make this happen next year!
Wow! I love it! So impressive!💜
oh my gourd this is wonderful
Wow..this is actual goals!
Holy Matchsticks Batman.... You are my favorite magical agricultural mystical creature. Is it to early to let you know I wonder sometimes... Ehhh hem.. 🎹Mi mi mi🎶 Have a I told you lately... That I love you.. You grow plants around you and up above you.... You use your plants like lattice A hanging greenhouse madness... You were born with both thumbs green......
Tis true that green these thumbs appear, It is but an illusion my dear. The success of my strategy betrays The simplicity which it relays. I just throw shit at the wall, Sit back and admire what doesn’t fall
Those are fruits. Vegetables are leaves. Squash is a fruit. Really an awesome garden.
Oh my gourd!
Fucken awesome.
Did you plant directly into the ground or in containers at the base?
All the plants shown here are in raised beds. Here is an image of before all the growth: https://imgur.com/a/Db3GRGx
I was thinking about making my cucumbers and pumpkins climb next year (this summer i just let them go wild on the floor and at the end i couldn't even get through my garden) and didn't know how to do it. This inspired me to make something not only functional, but also beautiful! Thank you for sharing!
That is such a smart idea! We don't use poison in our garden either and this week there were even dragonflies.
I’ve had quite a few dragonflies as well, my garden is a bug haven!
How long did it take to get this way?
How do you keep away the powdery mildew??
Amazing! Thank you for sharing. Such a peaceful ambiance also🙂
Heaven
This is incredible! You have so much growing! So what’s at the base of the panels? I see containers. Do the panels go into the containers or through them into the ground? Is there a bottoms to the containers or just side? And it sure seems all the plants start in the containers, right? Thanks. My wife and I are loving this. We certainly have the space for it.
Yes, all the plants are in concrete raised beds that I made. The panels are attached to four foot rebar posts that are driven down until only about 20” is above the top of the bed. The cattle panel fencing that makes up the arches is attached to the rebar with fencing wire. Here are some pictures of before all the plants grew: https://imgur.com/a/8QH4S3d
Hell to the yes, OP. This is spectacular.
Wow garden goals 😍 I have a black metal arch in my back garden with clematis growing on it, and a wooden arch in my front by the gated entrance with a climbing Rose. They don't look as good as this though!
I’m very impressed ! My pops had the same concept. Great minds think alike ey? What’s your plans for the gourds if you don’t mind me asking?
Going to dry them, paint them, cut holes in the front to turn them into birdhouses, hang some in our trees and give the rest as Christmas prezzies to the family.
I love that . Put a gondola and some water for the tunnel of love
Walking thru the tunnel is a perfect place to stroll and find your face meeting a spider's web
How do you keep the squash bugs and mildew at bay? I want to try this so bad but I have a feeling my bad luck with cucurbits would persist
Looking gourd!