I have been eyeing those big old beautiful pea teepee trellises that you see all over Pinterest for a couple of years now. I love ’em. I have visions of my kids happily playing inside while I harvest the multitudes of peas that I have grown on the outside. It is a beautiful vision.

There are visions though and there is reality. As my personal reality has it at the moment I just don’t have the time, funds or designated space for this large teepee dream. And let’s face it my kids would sit in it for about 3 minutes before they decided to start tearing at the pea plants or devise some sort of game that involves throwing rocks through it anyway

I was inspired to go for something similarish though. This is the year I take am taking my gardening more vertical so I made a smaller, more manageable version that involved zero trips to the hardware store. I am kinda loving.

My original idea was to use the grapevines that we were taking down and using those to build the structure. Those ended up being too flexible and my first attempt was a bust.

What did work were the the tall reedy stalks I was clearing out of my patch of bee balm along with a variety of other miscellaneous stalks, small branches and sticks.  I figured if they made it through this last Pennsylvania winter they were pretty resilient. I gave them a shot. I am big on trial and error.

I picked a spot in a raised bed and started stabbing the sticks into the ground. I they broke then I didn’t use them. If they didn’t break, I kept ’em. Simple enough. I arranged them in a circle. I then left them there in the ground for a couple of weeks. Amazingly they didn’t break or fall down.

I found some old kitchen twine in the back of a drawer and used that bind it all together. I just wove it around. I knotted the end to the base of one of the strongest looking sticks and started wrapping it around stick by stick. I looped it around each stick as I went going a little higher with each one. As I ran out of string I just tied another length onto the last.

I pulled the sticks together a little tighter with each trip around the circle. Once I got to the top I gathered all the sticks together and wrapped the remainder of the string around securing it all into place.

I was really happy with the result. It looks kinda rustic and weird but I like it. It’s always fun to give the neighbors something to wonder about.

It is stronger than I expected. We have had some pretty nasty rain and lots of powerful wind here since I put it up and it has not budged!

This last weekend I planted my peas. I planted them on both the outside and inside edge of the circle. I have issues with birds stealing my pea plants (seriously I do not have this problem with any other plants!) so I will be putting netting over it all.

I will be revisiting this later in the season to let you know if it all collapsed in on itself or if I have a structure of happy healthy pea plants. Fingers crossed.