My weekdays are filled with crafts and work, my weekends filled with landscaping.
The exception for this week is I got to get a little creative with the garden work!
With a tight deadline (we have 6 weeks left to get it all done) we were running out of time to shop for the perfect garden trellises to go out the front of the house.
I’ve always loved working with copper, and have lusted after a copper tube garden trellis for a while now, so this was the perfect opportunity for me to branch into metal working for a day or two!
It was relatively easy, I cut all pipe to lengths of 50cm, and use fittings and Gorilla Glue to attach everything together. We totally sucked at the maths in the beginning, and then extended the measurements to fill the space better, so it took two trips to Bunnings to get all the required materials!
I marked and cut all my tubes to 50cm using a pipe cutter
Then the (not so much) fun part of cleaning the sticky left from the bar-codes off as well as printed markings
I layed it all out to make sure I had enough bits and it was how I wanted it
The fun part! Glueing! I used Guerilla Glue, time will tell if this was a correct choice!
I glued the fittings to all the horizontal pieces first. I had newspaper under everything I was glueing, so not to get it on the floor (managed to get it on the floor anyways! maybe this should have been an outside project…)
Then glue in the vertical tubes
Leave them to dry. The glue fully cures in 24hrs
The lovely Guy installed them. We used small curtain rod brakets to hold them in place and concreted the base into the ground
Installed! All ready for passionfruit vines to climb!
I shopped at Bunnings for all my supplies.
I used:
7 pieces of copper pipe 3/4″ x 1.5m
3 pieces of copper pipe 1/2″ x 1.5m
4 copper reducing elbows 20 x 15mm
16 copper capillary reducings 20 x 20 x 15mm
And a small amount of Gorilla Glue
Each trellis measured 2.5m high before concreting into the ground. Approx 2.25m is visible once installed
This was by no means a cheap DIY, but I did get to make something that’s been on my wish list for a while now and was able to customize it to our space. It would look totally awesome if you used recycled copper tube. Copper only gets prettier with wear and ageing! Alas, I didn’t have the time to source recycled materials for this project.
I’m off to buy the passionfruit this morning. We planted a dwarf apricot tree in one of the bricked up holes (in the photo above, you can see the edge at the very bottom right), and are searching for a dwarf mulberry for the other hole (to the left). Grass goes in this Saturday too! And Guy is super excited to chuck in some nasturtiums for a bit of colour over summer!
Hopefully after this weekend we will be finished with landscaping (apart from planting the veggie garden) for a while, or at least until after the wedding! We have a lovely recycled brick path planned for down the side of the house, that will be a summer holidays task!
Enjoy the rest of your week 🙂
woohoo passionfruit! And Nasturtiums are awesome! But 6 weeks to go? Eep!