Taming the Vines

Late last summer we planted a vine in our flowerbed walkway. I envisioned the vine growing and blooming throughout the spring and summer months and staying green all your long. When we planted the vine, we used a simple iron trellis I bought years ago at a home improvement store. I thought it would take years for our vine to actually grow to climb the side of our house, since we only spent a spent six bucks on it at Lowes.

Here's a picture of our vine in September

Here's on vine in April of 2010, I'm amazed by how much our vine has grown. It's gotten so big its take over the metal trellis and is hanging like a weeping willow. I knew we had to stage vine intervention, and re-trellis our vine.

We went to Home Depot and looked at the trellises. We decided our using a simple wood trellis with wide openings to allow our vine to grow faster. Before we could install our new trellis, we had the tough job of unwinding the vines on the existing trellis. As you could imagine it took quite a bit of time.

Instead of attaching the trellis directly to our house we used brackets to hold the trellis in place. The trellis sits three inches off our house. This allows the vine to grow and breath and keep excess moisture away for our siding. The trellis brackets reminded me of curtain rod brackets.

We used four brackets to attached to our siding. Our new trellis is over eight feet tall.

I attached the vine to the new trellis using the highly scientific approach, twisty ties { aka: bread ties }. They worked perfectly, I was able to reattach the vine and the new trellis provided the support it needed.

Already our vine looks so much more healthier and has plenty of room to grow. I'm looking forward to the vine climbing its new home. The vine already has tons of flowers in bloom. I love that it stays green all year long and doesn't get 'woody' like some vines are known to do.

I have no green thumb, but here's how I've been taking care of my vine. In the fall months I water the vine every couple of days and use Miracle Grow once a week (this worked like a charm for our hanging pots) In the winter, I don't water it at all unless is a sunny day and warm outside. During the spring/summer months I tend water my vine every day. It gets really hot where we live in Northern California. It can easily reach over 100 degrees in July/August. Yikes, I know its hot here.

Do you have any tips keeping vines growing and healthy? Any plans to plant one this spring or summer?