Vegetable Garden Structures

Utilitarian Vegetable Garden Structures

The most popular vegetable garden structures are those that actually support plants, allowing them to climb as well as helping support the weight of the plants and their fruit.

Using cages and poles that allow for more vertical gardening can improve your yields per square foot because they'll be more room on the ground for plants.

There are all sorts of garden supports that can help your tomatoes, cucumbers, peas, eggplants and peppers. Lifting the fruit off the ground will produce hardier fruit that doesn’t get eaten by all the critters in your soil. The fruit will be less susceptible to rot as well. Stakes, cages and supports help your plants grow tall and strong.

Choosing Garden Structures

Whether you shop at a local garden supply shop or online, you'll find a dizzying array of vegetable garden structures to choose from. One wonderful place to shop online is Gardeners Supply Company. This company, which also has a mail-order catalog, offers trellises for cucumbers that allow them to shade other plants, classic tomato cages, spiral supports, bean towers, maypoles and more.

Many of these choices straddle the line between utilitarian and ornamental, because they look great while also doing a great job holding up your plants. A well-placed and well-designed garden structure can add beauty while improving the health of your vegetable garden.

Ornamental Garden Structures

The sky is the limit when you are looking for vegetable garden structures that merely serve the purpose of beauty. You can add a trellis, arbor or archway that is just for decorative purposes. It can help build a "doorway" or a "wall" to enclose and visually mark off the space of your vegetable garden.

Of course these garden structures can also be embellished with plants. If you don't want to plant vegetables to trail up your trellis, think about plants and flowers that would look nice in your garden, do well in the sun, and perhaps also attract beneficial insects.

Trumpet flowers, for instance, are a beautiful vine with stunning flowers that would bring color and bees to your vegetable garden.

Speaking of attracting beneficial creatures to your garden, one structure you might want to consider in or near your vegetable garden is a birth bath and/or a bird house. Attracting birds is a big part of your pest control process if you are engaged in organic gardening, because birds can eat a lot of harmful bugs.

When you make your yard and garden even more attractive to the winged creatures you want to have in your yard, they'll be happier to stay. In return, they will thank you by eating all those nasty critters you don't want to have to deal with anyway.

Using Plant Supports

Plant supports are very important garden structures, but it's important to use them properly for best results. In most cases you can't just put a stake or a cage in the ground and expect the plant to know what to do.

You can purchase plant ties at the same place you buy your garden structures. Another option is jute cord or twine to gently tie your plants to the poles or cages you have purchased.

You don't want to tie them tightly or it could hurt the plant, but the ties need to be sturdy enough to actually hold the plant up.

Take care when placing your stakes to drive them into the ground a little away from the main plant, so that you'll miss more of the plant's roots. Make sure the supports are driven well into the ground, because they will have to support a lot of weight through wind, rain and sun. The last thing you want is your whole garden structure, vegetables and all, falling over in a stiff wind!