David hit his head when we unfurled the cattle panel, and I scratched up my foot as we placed the arch in place, but we did it!
We now have a beautiful cattle panel arch in the garden!
We like the interesting shape of the arch. We still have to tie the squash up on it, and hopefully they’ll begin climbing on their own. The red kuri already has quite a few baseball sized squashes, so it may be time to sling them up also. Growing squash vertically is new to us, but I read a good article on Pinterest a while back: Make Room for Melons. Oh, and speaking of being addicted to Pinterest, here’s the thread I found about how to build a cattle panel trellis.
First thing we did is buy T posts and a post tool to help pound them in. David put in the four posts pretty quickly (although he realized afterwards that he needs earplugs next time).
Notice how crazy the squash is getting! You can see the young red kuri squashes near the wall. In the foreground, on the left, is where the acorn squash has been climbing up a tomato cage. This week we realized that the acorn squash is really buttercup!! I don’t know why it took us so long to notice that they weren’t pointy…
It was a bit scary to move the squash out of the way. It’s even scarier holding the vines while tying them to the trellis.
After we had the area ready, David cut the twine from the cattle panel.
David and Rosie posed for this picture right before they both got hit by the unfurling panel. Note to self: there is tension in the rolled up panel and use two people next time.
After we checked that everyone was ok, David and I folded the panel in half and moved it into place. We secured it with zip-ties and voila!
David is 6 ft tall and you can see how it towers above him. After this picture was taken, we continued to untangle and tie up the vines.
Tomorrow we build the A-frame trellis for the remaining squash and melons!
Life In Our Little LA Garden 
Love it! Great idea–I may steal it.
Please do! And I bet finding cattle panels will be easier than finding them in LA.
True! Home Depot sometimes sells them, but my go to for garden infrastructure is tractor supply company.
I wish I saw this before I bought wedding arches for my cucumbers. It looks really nice!
Thanks! Hopefully the squash will take to it! I’m sure the wedding arch is a little prettier.
Clever! Was it hard to shape the panel into a symmetrical arch?
Haha. The guys at the store rolled it in third, as you can see in the picture. We unrolled it and then bent it in the middle. This is the easiest trellis we’ve ever built!
This is a great idea! We build our trombocino squash support out of bamboo but I’ll have to remember this for a future use. Thanks for sharing.
Your squash looks great, love seeing it all over the place! We are growing squash for the first time this year (3 sisters: squash, beans, corn) and it’s already starting to climb on the corn.
hi, I’m coming late to the party here, but where did you find your cattle panel? I’ve been calling all over looking for it. I found one place in Palmdale that sells combo panel, but that’s a bit heavy. (1/4″ rod instead of ~1/8″ rod)
My husband was visiting friends in Bakersfield and picked up one at a local feed store. They rolled it up and he brought it back to LA. It’s the best thing for squash!!
Thanks! I’ll have to pick some up next time I find an excuse to drive north.