GROW YOUR GARDEN "UP" AS NATURE INTENDED

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Kept off the soil (on brick or stones) during the growing season and stored under a tarp over winter, untreated wood will last for five years or more. You can prolong its life by painting with pine tar or other relatively benign organic preservative. Pressure-treated wood would last longer, but who wants arsenate of copper in the garden soil?

I find that (with daily attention) the flexible growing tips of even the thickest vines of summer squash, small Delicata winter squash, cucumbers, and melons can be guided up and wound in and out the mesh and will stay on the frame with few twine-loop ties. The more flexible vines of sweet potatoes, New Zealand spinach, and finer-stemmed cukes can be twisted around the wires.

Some varieties are especially wellsuited to vertical growth. In general, the smaller the fruit, the better they can be coaxed to grow "up." Early Cluster or Russian cucumber sold exclusively by South Carolina seedsman R. H. Shumway is ideal for high-altitude growing, but like most old-fashioned cucumber varieties, it gets "gourdy" with age so is best when picked very young. It is highly productive and makes wonderful small pickles.

Small summer and winter squash and melons—even icebox-type mini water-melons—will do well on a trellis, but once the fruit begins to put on weight, it needs support. All fruit , need continual exposure to the sun, however, and I've hung them in string-mesh onion bags and rested them on shelves made by running a plank through a pair of coat hangers bent into a triangle and hooked to the wire a foot apart.

Tomato Stakes, Bins, and Cages

Next in order of height are tomatoes and small hot peppers that make huge bushes; but, being drycountry natives, they aren't designed to stand up to strong Yankee summer downpours.

You can make or buy any number of wire or plastic "tomato towers" yard-high cylinders that enclose the plant. Most I've seen are too rickety or have mesh that is too small for my hands to reach inside for harvest or pruning. The best I've seen are shaped like giant ice-cream cones placed open end down over young plants. They will contain the central leader, but fruiting stems grow out of the mesh so they don't interfere with harvest. In my experience, they are demons to get woody old vine out of.

Old-fashioned maybe, but better and cheaper is to tie tomato's central stem to four-feet lengths of sapling or rough-wood stakes with the lower 12 inches sunk beside the plant.

In the old days we tied up tomatoes with strips of old cotton undershirt, but they frayed and bleached and made the garden look ratty. Then garden-supply companies introduced wire-and-greenpaper twist-ties. The paper would dissolve and wire-twist connections would rust together and snag on stake or vine but could be left to corrode away to available-iron plant food in the compost. But now all you can buy are plastic strips with a stiffener in the middle that will last forever and must be removed and disposed of when they've lost their spring or you'll have a garden full of plastic. I like to burn old tomato vines on the compost heap at season's end to kill pest eggs and disease, but put the nutrients concentrated in the ash back into the garden. But burning twist-tie plastic, like plastic-mesh plant supports, makes a smoke that I wouldn't want a cinch bug to breathe.

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