A Better Trellis - part two

After my last post about "building a better trellis" I had a couple of questions that I wanted to take a minute to address as well as to share a couple of other options that I've used.

Wife to 1, Mom to 5~ liked the look of the trellising system that I wrote about, but needed a little more detail on how to grow her tomatoes.
Here you go:
This picture was taken in the '08 garden in August. It's helpful in this circumstance because it allows to you see the new framework system as well as my typical single frame tomato trellis so I can point out the differences.

The raised bed in the front is growing green beans up the twine while the raised bed in the rear had two varieties of tomato's. The single frame is made of electrical conduit and is approximately 6 - 6.5 foot tall. You can see that by August the tomato plants were already grown up and over the tops. I should add that these are indeterminate tomatoes, not determinant. The difference is that indeterminate tomatoes lend themselves better to climbing and trellising than do the determinant ones. In my previous post I showed this image: This is basically a hybrid of the single frame's tall single post to tie the twine to, with the ease and stability of the square trellis system. This is what I will be doing this year. I tied the strings to the bottom beam and then ran them up over the top beam and tied it loosely. (not too.) I place a string in the center of each square foot up the middle.

As the tomatoes grow all I had to do was gently guide them around the strings that I had tied in place. The tomatoes will naturally want to climb, they just need some support. One thing I may do is rather than tie the strings to the top of the center beam, I may tie it to the outer top beams so as to allow the tops of the vines to grow out onto them. Stay tuned in a couple of months for even more detail. For now, here's a close up of some San Marzano tomatoes growing up one of my string trellises. Pruning and training allow the plant to focus on producing tomatoes rather than plant vegetation.
Bill~ asked me at what interval I planted my green beans and how far apart are the twines? Here you go bill:
For beans and cucumbers, which are the two crops that I used these trellises for this year, I spaced beans at three plants per square foot. I alternated plants, zig-zagging along the bottom of the bed and trained the plants to grow up the strings that I had tied at approximately 6" intervals. For my six foot deep raised beds, I was able to plant 18 plants on each side of the center beam for a total of 36 plants. For cucumbers I planted them straight in line at two per square foot inline.

On the sides of the beds this year I grew onions, zucchini, herbs, a wild tomato, and carrots. I think any plant that can stand a little shade will be fine though.
And that brings me to Wendy~ who made the comment that she could see covering these trellises with plastic as a make shift greenhouse. Well, Wendy...There you go, These work very well for that as single frames, but I see no reason that they couldn't work fine as the square
trellises either.

My whole point in designing these trellises was to try to come up with something that I could modify easily and that would be versatile enough to be used season after season. They seem to have fit that bill so far I think. I look forward to hearing about your experiences with it!
Till next time.
P~