Nicole's Take: A trellis is one of the four essential components of a kitchen garden — it doubles your growing space, improves airflow and plant health, and adds structure and beauty to the garden year-round. Whether you're starting simple with bamboo stakes or investing in a durable, powder-coated steel trellis, there's an option for every budget.

By Nicole Johnsey Burke: Founder of Gardenary and Author of Kitchen Garden Revival

Why Every Kitchen Garden Needs a Trellis

If you’ve read my book, Kitchen Garden Revival, you know that I consider trellises to be one of the four essential components of a kitchen garden.

Here's what a trellis does for your garden:

• Increases your growing space — climbing plants grow up instead of out, freeing up bed space for everything else
• Improves plant health — better airflow around vines means less disease and pest pressure
• Adds year-round structure — a beautiful trellis looks stunning even in the middle of winter when nothing is growing on it
• Elevates the whole design — height creates visual interest that makes a kitchen garden look intentional, not accidental

Nicole's recommendation: The metal trellis is the sweet spot. If your budget allows for anything beyond wood, go straight to a metal trellis. The cost per season of use makes it the best value of the four options — and it's the easiest option for creating a stunning garden instead of one that looks DIY.

Wood Trellises

A super simple way to add support to your garden would be to use wood trellising. When I first started gardening, I collected bamboo stakes from a friend’s backyard for free. I formed the stakes into panels and connected them with netting in my garden beds. The little tendrils of my cucumber and bean plants loved clinging to the netting.

Wood trellis — the honest pros and cons:

• Pro: Free or very inexpensive — bamboo stakes from a friend's yard cost nothing
• Pro: Easy to DIY and remove from the garden when not in use
• Con: Thin wood rots within one season in moist garden soil
• Con: Needs constant reinforcing to stay upright
• Con: Tapers at the top, which crowds plants and wastes space at the base
• Con: Only looks attractive when covered in vines — bare wood isn't a design asset

How to Make Your Own Wood Trellis

You can do something as simple as I did—basically taking sticks the same length, forming a teepee with them, and tying them together with twine. Add smaller sticks for cross support, making diamond patterns on the side. You can use nails to secure the joints. If you have a lot of sticks on hand and don't mind rebuilding your structures each year, then DIY wood trellises could be a great option for you.

Alternatively, you could form your sticks or thin pieces of lumber from the hardware store into a ladder shape that narrows at the top by using two long pieces for legs and shorter pieces going across as rungs. Duplicate this ladder shape for the other side, and then connect these two ladders with more rungs.

If you're shopping for wood, make sure to do your homework and consult with an expert at the store before choosing the type of wood for your trellis project. Treated woods often contain harmful chemicals you don't want in your garden.

Where to Buy a Wood Trellis

Wood trellises are readily available online and in hardware stores. You can find wooden lattice trellises for anywhere from about $15 to $50 and wooden obelisk trellises for $50 to $110, depending on the size.

Not all wood trellises are made the same. Keep in mind that the thinner the wood, the more frequently you'll need to replace these trellises. (Your climate can also impact the lifetime of these trellises.)

Avoid wood trellises with parts held together by small staples or tacks, which can loosen easily and cause your structure to fall apart long before the wood rots.

Farm Fencing

When I graduated from bamboo poles, I went and bought an entire roll of metal fencing from a home supply store. This material would have been fine to use between vertical supports, but it was too flimsy to serve as an arch trellis the way I wanted. What I should have bought was cattle fencing or farm paneling from a tractor supply store. Made to be much stronger, cattle fencing can stand up on its own but can also be bent into an arch between beds.

Farm fencing — the honest pros and cons:

• Pro: Inexpensive — a full DIY setup can cost under $150
• Pro: Flexible enough to bend into an arch between raised beds
• Pro: Stronger than wood and holds up for several seasons
• Con: Can flop mid-season under the weight of heavy vines
• Con: Only looks good when covered in greenery — no year-round visual appeal
• Con: Lacks the vertical interest and design presence of a metal trellis

How to Set Up a Farm Fence Trellis

Grab some panels of cattle fencing, farm paneling, or remesh (concrete support wire that comes in inexpensive sheets) at your local tractor supply store or hardware store.

Attach your panels to a wooden fence using cat's claw fasteners or steel screw hooks. Or you can construct a simple wooden frame to hold the wire. You can also use T-posts to hold paneling upright and connect them with T-post clips.

Thanks to the flexibility of materials like cattle panels, you can easily stretch a sheet between raised beds to form an arch.

A 42" x 7' remesh sheet costs less than $20. Steel screw hooks cost a couple bucks each. A pack of 25 T-post clips costs about $5, and each 6' T-panel costs about $7. A 50'L cattle panel costs anywhere from $50 to $100. So depending on which materials you use, you could easily DIY your own trellises for under $150.

Metal Trellis Kits

The discovery of ready-made kits for obelisks, panels, and arches changed how I designed gardens for good.

Metal trellis kits — the honest pros and cons:

• Pro: Arrives ready to assemble — all pieces included, no sourcing hardware separately
• Pro: Powder-coated steel won't rust, rot, or need replacing season after season
• Pro: Beautiful year-round — looks stunning in the garden even before a single vine climbs it
• Pro: Ground spikes included for in-ground installation; raised bed soil holds legs securely when buried one foot deep
• Con: Higher upfront cost than wood or fencing — most kits run $125 to $499
• Con: Worth noting: the cost per season of use is actually lower than wood trellises that need replacing every year

How to Install a Trellis

I recently put together a new kind of trellis for my garden all by myself. Besides the fact that I’ve never been great at following directions while putting things together, this assembly was made difficult by the fact that this trellis is huge. Huge. We’re talking way taller than me.

Building the Gothic Large Arch Trellis was just a matter of fitting the sections together correctly on the ground before standing it up, but I definitely see why the directions recommend having two people during assembly and installation. Something to keep in mind if you purchase any of our trellis kits! 

Other tips for installing a trellis include:

• Install your trellis before adding soil to your raised bed, if possible. Otherwise, dig out soil from your bed, install the trellis, and backfill.
• Ensure the base of the trellis is buried at least one foot deep.
• Use metal stakes to help secure the trellis in place if your trellis kit provides them.

Custom-Designed Trellis

The arch trellises in my garden were crafted in one piece and designed for my garden space. Each trellis is one welded piece of metal—no screws or anything. After moving from Houston to Chicago to Nashville and installing these trellises in three new gardens, I can attest to their durability.

Pros of Custom Trellises

These trellises bring vertical interest and beauty, in addition to, you know, supporting my plants season after season. So many of you have asked about these trellises that I'm working on getting them turned into a kit we can sell here in the Gardenary shop.

If your budget allows for a custom piece, you can create something unique and long-lasting that fits your exact space perfectly.

Cons of Custom Trellises

Working with a metal smith to create a custom piece is a splurge and probably above most budgets. (The silver lining is you'd be supporting someone's craft.)

It's Time to Add a Trellis to Your Garden!

A trellis transforms a garden from a collection of plants into a space that feels designed — somewhere you actually want to spend time.

If you're ready to invest in something that looks stunning year-round and holds up for seasons to come, a powder-coated steel trellis is where I'd start. Browse the Gardenary trellis collection to find the right fit for your space.

I can't wait to see what you grow this year!

Some of the links in this article are Amazon affiliate links, which means I receive a small commission at no extra cost to you if you click on the link and purchase the item. All opinions remain my own.