How to build a wooden trellis

After we moved into our house we discovered a young grape vine growing in the back yard. Well, it wasn't growing when we moved in, at that point it really just looked like a stick in the ground, but before long it sprouted leaves, and vines and even a solitary little bunch of grapes. We're still waiting to find out what type of grapes we have, and whether they're good for eating (or making wine?). In the meantime I thought I'd better do something to support the vines that were getting ganglier by the day, and starting to lean out onto the ground.

I checked out trellises at my local hardware and garden stores, and was shocked to find that even basic wooden ones cost at least $30. Forget what you'd pay for a fancy wrought-iron one! The one I made cost about $6 in materials, and took me less than an hour to make. I used five 8' 1x2s, a hand saw, a drill and a handful of 1.5" screws. If you have any scraps of 1x2 around, this is a great opportunity to use them up, since this project requires some shorter pieces, and it doesn't really matter how long they are. Here's my setup:

I started by laying an 8' 1x2 that would be the center piece on the ground, and attached a short (about 1') cross piece to it about 18" from the bottom using two screws. If you want to be sure that the wood won't split, you can pre-drill the holes, but I just went ahead with the screws themselves and backed up and drilled if the wood looked like it was starting to split.

I then attached two more 8' 1x2s, one to each end of the cross piece, using only one screw each so that I would be able to adjust the angle between each of them and the cross piece. This is how you control how much wider your trellis is at the top than it is at the bottom. I just sort of looked at it and adjusted it until it seemed right.

I used a scrap piece of 12 that I had lying around for the next cross piece, attaching it where the vertical pieces were the same distance apart as it was long. I then cut one of the other 8' 1x2s into two pieces, one smaller and one bigger, and attached them lower down and higher up on the trellis, respectively. I attached each one to the center piece and each of the other vertical pieces with two screws. 

At that point I decided that the trellis had enough bars and vertical pieces for my purposes, but you could certainly add as many cross pieces as you want. If your outside vertical pieces were farther apart, or you wanted to build a very tall trellis (or a short wide one), you could add more vertical pieces. I would recommend attaching them to the second or third cross piece, so that more structure is added to the trellis as it gets wider. 

Here's how the trellis looks now that the grape vines have grown a bit more, and are used to being supported by it.

Grapes are, of course, far from the only type of plant that a trellis like this could be used for. It would be great for roses too, and you could use different sizes and widths of trellises for raspberries, cucumbers, pole beans or any kind of climbing vine. 

You could also paint or decorate this trellis in any number of ways (red, anyone?) to add a splash of extra colour and interest to your yard or garden. Do you have a home made or decorated trellis? I'd love to see what you've done, and hear your ideas for how I should jazz mine up a bit!

James vs. The Stump

One of the first challenges that we discovered once we decided that we wanted to move the fence in the back yard to create two parking spaces off of the lane (besides, of course, how to remove the existing chain link fence) was that there was a medium-sized stump right where we wanted to put the new fence.

I suppose that we could have moved the fence a bit closer to the lane, or a bit closer to the house, but we wanted to line it up with the end of the neighbour's garage, since we felt that it would look nicer that way, while providing the right amount of space for parking. So, given that the stump was in the way, we had to figure out what to do about it.

One good solution for stump removal is to rent a stump grinder, and grind the stump down. I talked to the folks at our local hardware store (where they rent stump grinders) about this idea. It would have cost about $70 for the day, which we thought was a bit pricey, and the only grinder that they had would have been overkill for our (relatively) small 6-inch diameter stump.

We decided that for our purposes, it would be fine to leave the underground part of the stump intact, if we could just cut it down so that it was level with the ground, or a little lower. We would have to avoid it when it came time to dig the post holes, but other than that, the fence would go over it just fine, and it seemed like a lot less work than actually trying to dig up the whole stump (especially since we don't know how big the tree was, so it's very hard to know how big the below-ground part of the stump is).

We began this project by using our new shovel to dig down around the stump, so that we would have access to where we needed to cut for it to end up shorter than ground level. Here you can see another much smaller stump that is also in our yard. (This is as far as we've got with it at this point though.)

Once we had dug a nice moat around the stump, James got out the axe and our little hacksaw, and started experimenting with different techniques for demolishing the stump. The axe proved to be less effective than we had thought, since it was hard to get a good swing in and hit the stump parallel to the ground, which is what we really needed.

He was better, but still slow, progress with the saw when our friendly Italian neighbour (whose name I really must ask again) came out to help. He and his elderly wife have surely been living in the neighbourhood for on the order of 40 years, and she has managed to conduct her business entirely in Italian! (You can read more about them, and about our neighbourhood in my first post.) He offered us his axe, which was heavier than ours,  his wood saw, which worked much better than a hacksaw for this job. Our neighbour even climbed over the low fence separating our yards to bring the tools, and offer his support. Here is a picture of James in his ferocious battle with the stump.

The best technique for removing the stump was to use the saw to cut a 1 inch groove parallel with the ground along one side of the stump, and then use the axe to chip off that section of the stump. James worked his way around the stump this way in ever-decreasing circles (an age-old technique that can also be used to find your way to a destination when you're lost).

We did eventually emerge victorious from the Battle of the Stump, but it took a lot of patience, and having the right (or at least better) tools certainly helped. We hope that this advice will save you some time the next time you need to level a stump. 

If you have any tips or suggestions to add, we'd love to hear them, since we still have one more stump to go! Here is a picture of the ground after the stump was removed, and we had leveled the ground in preparation for putting up the fence.

Finding a Mummified Squirrel

Today we dug holes for our new fence posts, and in the process (although not underground), I found a mummified squirrel. Well, it wasn't actually wrapped in cloth or anything, but it was a very well-preserved squirrel specimen.

It startled me when I first realized what it was, and then my scientific curiosity took over. It was actually very cool, although I did feel bad for the little guy, because he apparently did not get a proper burial. The most interesting part of it, I think, was that this was not just a squirrel skeleton (not that you see those every day...), but the skin and whiskers were preserved as well.

Here is a photo for those with a healthy scientific curiosity. You can't see it that well, but I wanted to include the trowel for scale.

Tomorrow (when I have my good camera with me) I will take another photo, and then we will give this poor little guy the proper burial that he deserves.

Have you ever found the remains of an animal, an interesting fossil, feather or something like this when you were digging in your yard? I'd love to hear your stories of interesting finds!


Update: Here are some better photos of the mummified squirrel:

The squirrel has now had a proper burial in our back garden.