Tepee for my...

In prior years, I have created trellises with bamboo stakes and string for peas and cucumbers.  They have generally failed miserably.  So, I'm going Tonto-style this year.  Umm, I guess that's not very politically correct.  Whatever.  I'm building tepees for my peas.  Above is the first one I build.  This one is made out of dried mammoth sunflower stalks from last year's garden.  After I chopped the heads off last year, I let them sit in the garden, serving as tomato stakes.  They dried, and during debris removal time in the fall, I chopped them off at the base and stored a bundle of them in the shed rafters.

This is tepee #2, mostly pecan branches that fell off trees last fall and over the winter.  They aren't as straight as the sunflower stalks, so this one looks kinda crappy.  Should still work just fine.  This one isn't for peas.  It has Kentucky Wonder pole beans planted around it.

OK, this is what you do when you are out of material that's long and straight enough to make a tepee, but still have over half of packet of peas left to plant.  Yes, I jammed fallen pecan branches into the soil.  Right now it looks like a dead bush, but in a month it will be a pea tree.

Here's a picture of the nice tepee and the bush.  There are two kinds of peas planted here, Blondie peas which are a pale yellow pea, and more traditional green English peas.

All three of the structures for vining plants are in the picture above.  I like the way they look, and they should  work much better than the string trellis from prior years.