May 17, 2025

These garden obelisks will be to train my garden tomatoes this summer. Previous years I've used just bamboo sticks, but I found that they're quite slippery to tie plants onto. Yes they're strong sticks, but you need some horizontal supports to hold the tomato vines and the plants can get enourmous. 

I saw these obelisks on pinterest and thought they looked lovely and natural, so I ordered some willow from a farm and got to work! I found a YouTube video for method and instructions. I've done weaving before so it wasn't too tricky. 

Ideally I wanted to have the vertial stakes in willow as well as the weavers, but the willow I got was way to thin and flimsy to service as stakes. The stakes need to be usually at least twice as thick as the weavers to keep the structure firm. I ended up having to use my bamboo sticks. I reused some of the bamboo I bought when trying to make my desert contraption.

Each obelisk takes about 20-30 minutes. I made a jig to hold the bamboo sticks inplace while I was weaving, it also helped me make consistent sized structures. The alternative method is to just push the stakes into the ground to keep them firmly inplace. 

I managed to make 6 obelisks in total before running out of bamboo. 6 is enough for now... I won't install them until the tomatoes are a bit bigger and actually need the support, otherwise I might shade them or block them too much 

Total Likes: 0

Comments

---

No comments yet.

---