TRELLIS and Plant Support using INVASIVE Plants

[00:00:00]My woods are loaded with invasive honey suckles, autumn olives, a lot of stuff you should be cutting down. And cut it down I have. And with all this natural resource here, I've been looking for different ways to support plants. One of the things I'm looking at supporting is these tamatillos.

[00:00:18]And you can see here I have some Japanese honeysuckle up to the fence here. The idea is this tomatillo is going to get strapped to this. Climb up this fence. That should give it enough room. I've also utilized some dead blackberry to do the same thing over here. But I'm going to have to get creative when we're in open spaces here and a space like this. I have three plants here. So maybe I want to make something to support a pepper or an eggplant. Something that's not going to get too big. I have a cut off of autumn olive here. I'm just going along here and I'm just chopping all these side shoots off here. I don't mind if it bends a little bit like this. I think that adds character to it. And then the portion I'm going to stab into the ground, I'll take my Felco eights here and I will give it a 45 degree or more chop to give it a nice sharp edge to push into the ground and then snip it off wherever I think it gets too weak to hold the plant. Now here I have some Japanese honeysuckle which is also incredibly invasive here in Michigan.

[00:01:34]This is going to be my favorite for doing this because this stuff, even when it dries, is flexible and fibrous, so it's not going to crack in the wind. I found that out when I go to burn this stuff that I can't just crack it into little pieces cuz it holds together. So, I got to saw it. So, we got this little eggplant here. We're just gonna go off to the side of the root ball that's in here. And I'm going to push this into the ground, as far as I can get it.

[00:02:05]So, what we have is a support that's flexible because you want your plants to flex in the wind. It's pretty solid here. And what's going to happen is this root system when it expands is going to expand around this support here and hold it into place even more. So for this eggplant, we're about 2 foot off the ground. That's going to be perfect.

[00:02:28]Let's do one more eggplant over here.

[00:02:31]And then I have a cool one we're going to do for the tomatillos that does not involve just a straight steak.

[00:02:40]So here I have this exceptionally large piece that I cut down. So my plan here is I'm going to take off all these spindly branches first, the ones that can't support any plants just to clean it up.

[00:02:57]We're going to get the main shape here and then we're going to take it to the garden and do some refinements.

[00:03:03]And if you guys are looking for the best pruner money can buy, it's the Felco 8.

[00:03:08]I push this in a lot of my videos.

[00:03:10]There's a link in this video to get these. They're a little expensive, but they're going to last you forever.

[00:03:16]So, there she is all skeletonized. Let's go take this in there and see what we can do with it. So, I want this one tree here to support all three of these tomatillos.

[00:03:29]That means I want to go dead center of all three of these plants and I want to angle my branches so I can hang some strings off them for the tamatillos to grow up. So, first step, I'm going to take my samurai saw here and give this a nice sharp edge to push into the ground.

[00:03:56]Then I want to find where my top branches work best. Put this in the center here. Looks like if I do this, I can get full coverage of all these tomatillos. Now, this is nice. I actually have a branch here for leverage to push this in.

[00:04:22]And to get it even even more, I think I can use this block of wood laying in the garden here to slip it in here.

[00:04:36]To make it extra sturdy, I can just take some blocks of wood, some rocks, and just put it along the sides here. It's already pretty sturdy as is, but just a little extra support for it. Now, I got some string here. This is the stuff you use to tie up tomatoes if you're growing vertically. I like this stuff. Works pretty good. Let's see what we can do with this support we've created using a string. I'm going to start out around the base of this plant here.

[00:05:07]And I'm going to make a knot.

[00:05:11]It's got to be nice and loose so when this plant grows, we don't girdle it.

[00:05:15]Then I'm going to pull this string up.

[00:05:18]And this looks like a good branch right here to tie off to. Now, we're not pulling this string tight. We're going to leave this string plenty loose here cuz this is going to bend and sway. We don't want to rip this plant out. And tie this up top.

[00:05:35]We're going to do the same thing to the one right next to it.

[00:05:39]And I want to bring this up pretty high because these are going to get pretty tall.

[00:05:46]And then finally, we'll get the last one.

[00:05:50]Like before, we'll take it up nice and high.

[00:05:55]String's nice and loose. We'll go ahead and start wrapping it a little bit here just to get the string working its way around.

[00:06:09]These are not liking this extreme sun and heat after that cold day yesterday, but I think they're going to be all right.

[00:06:20]So, you can see we're wrapped around, but not tight to girdle it. The idea here is as this grows, we're going to wrap it around the string. So, what I could do now is come through here and clear out some of this stuff I know I'm not going to use. But I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to leave that for now. In case these plants get tall and start growing off to the sides, I can always hang a string here and let the plants drape over. And since we've cut off all these side branches, we're not really cutting off light to anything else. So, I like it the way it is here.

[00:06:55]See, it is very solid here. Especially with these blocks of wood at the base here. I think this is going to work out pretty good. Just did another one right here. To get the right branch, I actually cut a live one, which is good.

[00:07:10]We're taking out some invasive honeysuckle to do this. I wanted a split here because I got a plant here and a plant here. I wanted to hang the strings off opposite ends. So, we got this guy climbing up and that guy climbing up right there. I even used some box elder I cut down.

[00:07:31]that's going to support this pepper when it gets big. Everything's a plant stake if you're brave enough. Now, one bit of caution while doing this. You're going to want to make sure the invasive plants you're using do not root from cutings.

[00:07:46]Now, some plants will root. Branches like willow root really easily.

[00:07:51]Something like this that's been cut down and dead for a long time is not going to root. Even the fresh ones I cut down, they might leaf out a little bit, but they're not going to root. So, you don't have to worry about them spreading to your garden. I have found that fresh cut autumn olive will root within a season, but if it does, it's really easy just to yank it out at that point. I hope this helps you out. Maybe you're in a place where some storm damage came through.

[00:08:17]You got some thinner branches laying around. You can use pretty much anything to support plants. So, I was just coming out this morning wondering how I'm going to support all these plants. And I thought, well, let's go take a look in the woods and see what we got. And sure enough, we got plenty of invasives in there. So, why not make use of them?

[00:08:36]Thanks for watching.