A pretty trellis?

Our house is on a corner lot and we have to have an iron fence per our HOA instead of a wood privacy fence. Thus, my garden is "out there" for all to see. No problem, except I need to come up with a nice-looking trellis for all my climbing veggies. I had planned to use cattle panel and got overruled by the rest of the household. . . They are worried the HOA will make me take it down if it doesn't look good.
My vision was to have a cattle panel trellis go between my two 4 x 8 beds so that veggies from both beds could climb up and over, making a tunnel of sorts.  Now I'm thinking about doing some sort of PVC trellis that I could spray paint black or really dark brown to match the fence/house trim. I have the netting that I could string between the PVC.  My thinking is that it will mimic the look of the iron fence enough that no one will complain, yet serve the function I need.
Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions or hopefully pictures of something I could show my engineer husband so he can build it for me?  Also, I'm not terribly concerned about shade from the trellis since my garden will get full sun all day and a little shade will probably be welcomed! I searched the forum and didn't see too much, although my search was far from exhaustive.

Does your husband weld?  That opens up lots of possibilities.

A wood framed arbor to support either netting or cattle panel would look nice. Google 'arbor' and look at images.

Could you turn that arch into a square? Then you could conform the edges of the cattle panel to a tall rectangular wooden frame connecting the two beds, and what what people would mostly see would be the wood itself. All the better if it matches the color of your beds. You could even paint the outside of the beds and paint the rectangular "arch," say a nice pastel or white, so everything has a bright upbeat look that doesn't try to hide but says "Look at me and how pretty I am! I want everyone to see!" Sometimes half the battle is presentation, right?

Anyway, that would leave you with essentially an arbor connected at the bottom of each side with a bed. Once the greenery starts growing up the arbor, any lingering doubts about how pretty it is should vanish.

You could bend the cattle panel into the right shape by standing on a 2x4 at the right place, and then bending the cattle panel up at the right place. Do that twice and you have your rectangular arbor "arch."

A few flowers in the front square of the beds wouldn't hurt. You could even put small hanging (or wired-on to the cattle panel) baskets or pots along the front, most visible side of the arbor with some flower in them. Trailing, like many nasturtiums, or perhaps dwarf french marigolds, which bloom prolifically, are good companion plants, and tend to get no bigger than their pots and your watering allows, so they'd never shade out other plants. I think you could make it quite pretty and still keep all your important original objectives -- connecting your bed with an arbor-like section of cattle panel that you can train climbing veggies on.

Re the painted PVC, I suspect that won't fly. We've got lots of PVC, and it always still looks like PVC.

You could paint the cattle panel to match your fence.

How about if your hubby framed it in, sort of like this pic  http://www.flickr.com/photos/7608643@N06/2249054163/
and painted the cattle panel to match your house like yolos suggested, or even a brown or some sort of color to make it disappear? like brown etc.

If you frame in both sides and let it just arch over to the other side, it might look pretty nice??

Just sharing some photos I shot at OSH.  What did I ever do without an iphone?   

Hello kamigh,


I live in an HOA in Double Oak, very close to you.  FWIW, I use a combination of wood trellises, emt hoops and emt poles in my garden. 

I couldn't find a photo with everything in place, but this is one showing the trellises. I now also leave the emt hoops in place with the trellises so I can put shade cloth on them when I want.



So far, the HOA has been happy with what we're doing.

Hope this helps,
Gloria

I don't blame them. Wow, that is really pretty.

Gloria, Wow! Beautiful

Thanks very much!  I appreciate it.

Thanks everyone for your advice and especially Gloria for her beautiful, inspiring pictures!!!  I talked to the family again this weekend and the short story is that everyone loves the fruits of my labor but don't want to do any (more) labor to help me!  So I was pretty much given free rein to go out and get something nice.  I went looking around and a local garden center had two of these beautiful trellises so I bought them!  Not cheap, but they are pretty and will serve my function quite nicely.  My plan is to put all my vining stuff where the trellises are, and add some netting between the trellises when the vines start growing.   Here's a picture of my fledgling little garden . . . I've still got work to do and have to put some pea gravel down between the beds, but you can get the idea.

kamigh wrote:Thanks everyone for your advice and especially Gloria for her beautiful, inspiring pictures!!!  I talked to the family again this weekend and the short story is that everyone loves the fruits of my labor but don't want to do any (more) labor to help me!  So I was pretty much given free rein to go out and get something nice.  I went looking around and a local garden center had two of these beautiful trellises so I bought them!  Not cheap, but they are pretty and will serve my function quite nicely.  My plan is to put all my vining stuff where the trellises are, and add some netting between the trellises when the vines start growing.   Here's a picture of my fledgling little garden . . . I've still got work to do and have to put some pea gravel down between the beds, but you can get the idea.

Very nice and with HOAs you have to do the best you can.  

Kay

Spacing the trellises out and putting netting between them is a great idea. I bet that will look fantastic when the season is in full swing.

Very good looking set-up.

kamigh wrote:Thanks everyone for your advice and especially Gloria for her beautiful, inspiring pictures!!!  I talked to the family again this weekend and the short story is that everyone loves the fruits of my labor but don't want to do any (more) labor to help me!  So I was pretty much given free rein to go out and get something nice.  I went looking around and a local garden center had two of these beautiful trellises so I bought them!  Not cheap, but they are pretty and will serve my function quite nicely.  My plan is to put all my vining stuff where the trellises are, and add some netting between the trellises when the vines start growing.   Here's a picture of my fledgling little garden . . . I've still got work to do and have to put some pea gravel down between the beds, but you can get the idea.

Where did you get the pretty corner pieces on your boxes?  I think your set up looks great so far.

Gloria, that looks beautiful!

R&R-
I got those corners from Plow & Hearth online.  They come four to a set, one of each bug (ladybug, dragonfly, bee, butterfly).  I bought 4 sets because eventually I'd like to have 4 beds, and I don't want to wait until next year and find out they don't have them anymore!
They also have plain ones and colored corners that have vegetable shapes.  If you buy 2 or more sets of them they are about $30/set, otherwise they are $35.