Quick, Easy, and Inexpensive Muscadine Trellis

Here at the Carter homestead we are always looking for ways to expand our food production and to do this as inexpensively as possible.

When a friend of mine offered me some muscadine vines I jumped at the opportunity. This opportunity only presented one challenge. I had no trellis. I thought about letting the vines run up a couple trees that we have on our place. After all that is what they do in the wild.

That wouldn't have cost us anything, but there would be a lot of fruit that we couldn't harvest. That's not good. Around here we look at production as well as cost. I decided against the truly natural route due to inability to harvest.

So I had to look for another way. I thought about just training them up the fence, but since the fence is maintained on one side by us and the other by our neighbors, my wife thought that this was not a good idea.

Back to the drawing board for an inexpensive trellis.

As I mentioned in Building a New Chicken Pen, I found several t-posts that had been returned and was able to get them for less than half price. So about $2.00 per t-post. I had galvanized wire here left over from another project. I bought a 8 foot 2x2 cost about $3.00. All that I needed were wedge locs. 

Below is the hardware that I used to make the crossbar. Basically I turned this into an H brace.

Two Universals

Sorry couldn't find a link for individual pieces. This is for a 100 count.

Total cost for this trellis was about $15.00.

I cut the 2x2 to six feet so I had two pieces. One was used for the crossbar and the other was used for the tension bar. I made a video of the process. The video quality isn't very good, but I think it is good enough that if you needed to see it being made you could do so after watching the video. You can see the video below.

I hope you enjoyed this post and I hope you learned how to make a trellis that is fully functional and inexpensive. Being frugal while increasing you self sustainability will help you achieve your

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