Use cattle panels to support your garden

Seed stores and catalogs are replete with all one needs to grow a $100 tomato or a $200 one with only a bit more shopping. But by far the most useful thing you will find in my garden does not come from a nursery at all and was made for entirely another purpose.

I first noticed a garden use for “cattle panels” north of Sturgeon where an Amish gardener had bent one into a graceful arch and was growing gourds on it. The arch had an unusual lack of symmetry to it, somewhat like the cross-sectional upper arc of an aircraft wing, making its 16-foot sweep especially attractive. The thought immediately struck that such a thing could support my Armenian cucumbers (very unusual and very, very good) and zuchetta (or trombocini) squash (a pale green Italian variety not much like zucchini and delicious).

A cattle panel is a portable piece of relatively inexpensive, rigid yet flexible, light-weight, steel mesh “fencing” that you can quickly cut to about any size you like. You can pick up and move pieces of it about and stand them into the ground wherever you want (while not needing much of a post to stay up). The panel is high enough to give pause to deer if used as fencing.

You can easily train your snow peas and green beans on a vertical piece of it (or on two pieces of it leaning into each other to make a self-reinforcing triangular support), or, somewhat less easily, bend it into an archway to your garden.

I often lay a portion of panel flat on the ground to discourage my dog from disturbing freshly planted rows. Pieces of panel surround my compost pile and clematis runs up long narrow pieces left over from other applications. The range of practical use seems as least as wide as that of duct tape, with imagination the only bound, though the panels seem too flimsy to be of use with cattle.

Cattle panels are found at most local farm/home/feed/seed stores. Each panel is an expansive rectangular grid of one fourth-inch round steel rods. The rods are welded together on 6-by-8 inch centers (most frequently) and the whole thing dipped in galvanize and rustproof. Until steel tariffs were imposed four years ago (and recently removed) the 50-square-foot panels cost $12 but, like gasoline, the price has risen nearly 50 percent in the same four years (as our dollar has lost comparable value in foreign-driven steel markets).

The only real problem is dealing with the panels is their initial size. Each comes in 16-foot-long lengths, and in widths of either 52 or 37 inches, the wider weighing about 25 pounds.

The people at the store know how to bend the panel to fit into the back of a pick-up so that the whole thing can be driven home — if you have a pick-up. If you don’t, then you can have them quickly and easily cut the thing into smaller pieces that may be more useful to you to begin with.

For example, since my raised beds are 8 feet long, I have them cut one panel into two 8-foot lengths, immediately giving me two supports for my snow peas. All I need do upon getting home is to snip off the last horizontal metal rod, exposing 6 inches of vertical metal every 8 inches that I can then push right into the ground to hold the panel-cum-trellis up. A piece of concrete reinforcement bar tapped into the ground on each end provides added support if needed.

No matter what size you bring the panel home in you will no doubt want to cut and form it in various ways over time. A hacksaw will work for cutting such mild steel but I much prefer a small bolt cutter, or a cut-off wheel in a hand-held grinder for both speed and ease. Long pieces are easy to bend to a large radius and will spring back when released. To make a permanent bend almost anything that will hold the panel in place will do; I have bent pieces around a large tree, around a tractor tire, around an old 50-gallon drum. Holding a piece of 2-by-4 across its width and applying force by some means then allows you to make a fairly uniform, permanent bend around whatever object you are bending against. Such varied shapes and sizes of panels are easily the most widely used device in my garden.