Foray into teepee trellis building!

A while back I read about building a trellis built in the shape of a teepee. The idea is you plant pole beans at the base of each teepee pole, the beans grow and next thing you know you have a wonderful living (and productive!) teepee for the kids to play in and pick beans from. Now, that is the idea. What will actually happen is any one's best guess! Today we went ahead and built a *very* crude teepee trellis. Don't laugh. It didn't cost any money and the kids had a lot of fun helping me.

First we gathered up the longest and straightest (of which there weren't any) Ash branches from when we had the big Arizona Ash that overhangs the house trimmed. I cut any smaller branches off the main trunk, then we hauled them over and stacked them against the shop. We then measured and cut each branch down to usable size. The center pole was 10', the radius poles were 8'.


The boys had fun hauling the sticks around. We decided to build the teepee in the backyard instead of in the garden. I don't have any grass left anyway between last years drought and the horses raids.

Here's Magnus with 4 of the radius poles up. We were originally going to build 2 teepees with 4 poles each. But when we got 4 up we realized that would leave us a teepee with a pretty bare roof! So we put all 8 radius poles on one center pole. We buried the poles about 6-8 inches into the ground then haphazardly lashed the tops together with hemp cord. Nothing special about hemp, it's just what I already had on hand.

Here's Odin once we got all 8 poles around the center pole. Much better! Now in a couple months when it's warm enough we'll plant the beans! Assuming of course that the teepee stays standing that long!

No outdoor adventure around here would be complete without odd candid photos. I came out of the shop with my circular saw in hand to find Magnus sprawled out flat on our gravel driveway. I asked him what he was doing and he told me he was trying to play dead to see if the vultures would come down and get him (perfectly logical if you're 8, I'm sure). Except Koda, being the wonderful guardian puppy that he is, messed up Magnus' plan by cuddling and moving around to much. I snapped a picture then told Magnus he was probably lying on top of a horse turd. Should have seen how fast he jumped up!

Odin found an empty spider egg sack attached to one of the sheds. Pretty cool! Spiders are such amazing little artisans.