7 Best Cucumber Trellis Ideas + Easy DIY Designs with Photos

Growing cucumbers on a trellis is a great way to save space and maximize yield! Come explore a variety of cucumber trellises, including some of the best clever, cheap, and easy DIY cucumber trellis ideas. There are options and styles for every budget, skill level, and any size garden – including pots, containers or raised beds. I’ve also included a few quick tips on the best types of cucumbers to grow on trellises.

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The Benefits of Cucumber Trellises 

Growing cucumbers vertically up a trellis offers numerous benefits: it saves space, increases airflow (which reduces disease and pests), makes harvesting easier, and keeps the cucumbers growing nice and straight! When left to grow sprawling over the ground instead, cucumbers tend to curl, get discolored spots, and are more vulnerable to pests.

In small garden spaces, you may even be able to grow shade-tolerant crops below your cucumber trellis. For example, planting lettuce, radishes, spinach, or other small leafy greens under a trellis maximizes your growing space AND provides valuable shade for heat-sensitive plants during summer. 

RELATED: Need tips on general cucumber plant care? Come visit this guide on how to plant and grow cucumbers, which covers everything from seed through harvest!

Best Types of Cucumbers to Grow on a Trellis

Cucumber plants have two different growth habits: bush or vining. Be sure to read the plant description and choose vining cucumber varieties if you plan to trellis them! Vining cucumbers are the most common type. These large sprawling plants grow best with a trellis for support, and produce more fruit over a longer period of time.

In contrast, bush cucumber varieties are compact, bear less generous volumes of fruit per plant, and don’t require trellising. They’re also ideal for pots or containers!

Some of our favorite vining cucumber varieties to grow include Tasty Green, Telegraph, and Manny – all delicious thin-skinned “burpless” varieties. Many classic slicer cucumbers and petite pickling cucumber varieties are also vining.

Cucumber Trellis Size Requirements

Cucumber trellises come in a variety of shapes, sizes and styles – as we’ll explore below! Here are a few general tips to choose or make the best size DIY cucumber trellis:

• Cucumber vines grow about 4 to 6 feet long on average, sometimes up to 8 feet or longer depending on the variety. That said, an ideal cucumber trellis should be at least 4 or 5 feet tall. If you’re growing a variety with extra-long vines, take that into consideration!
  
  
• The trellis should be at least 1 foot wide per cucumber plant. Using a wider trellis allows you to grow several plants side-by-side up the same trellis, spaced about a foot apart along the base.
  
  
• The openings in the trellis should be wide enough for you to fit your hands through for harvesting, especially if you can only access the trellis from one side.
  
  
• Vining cucumber plants naturally climb trellises with clinging tendrils, so there’s no need to tie them up. They’ll easily wrap around wire, string, or skinny wood stakes. However, you may need to help guide the vines in the right direction, especially at first.

7 Cucumber Trellis Ideas and Styles

1) A-Frame Cucumber Trellis

An A-frame trellis is perfect for growing cucumbers. Shaped like the letter “A”, the simple design allows you to plant cucumbers up both sides of the slanted structure. Or, let the plants grow up one side and back down the other, depending on the height and size.

You can either buy a pre-made A-frame trellis like ours, or make your own simple cucumber trellis from wood, wire, stakes, bamboo, twine, netting, or other materials.

The examples below show one DIY cucumber trellis made from cattle panel (bent in half), and another constructed of 2×2″ wood sides, 1×1″ wood horizontal supports across the top and bottom, and concrete wire remesh on each side for the lattice. The builder explains “I offset one side so that it nests in the other, and attached them at the top with bolts, locknuts and washers so that it can be folded flat for easy storage.”

2) Vertical Cucumber Trellis

Vertical cucumber trellises are the ultimate space-saver. Placing a vertical trellis along an edge or backside of a raised garden bed leaves the rest of the bed free for other plants! Vertical or flat trellises can also be used to easily grow cucumbers along a fence or wall.

However, be sure to consider the direction of the sun to avoid shading out nearby plants. If you live in the northern hemisphere, it’s best to locate the trellis on the north side of a garden bed or along a south-facing wall to maximize sun exposure.

This cucumber trellis idea is also the easiest to DIY! You can make a very simple vertical trellis with wire fencing or netting strung between two sturdy stakes or t-posts. Or for a more permanent installation, build a wood frame around the wire or netting (shown below).

We love to use concrete wire remesh for our DIY trellises. Remesh isn’t quite as sturdy as cattle panel without additional support (e.g. stakes along the the sides) but is more affordable, more rigid than other wire fencing options, and has the ideal size openings. For more details, follow our step-by-step guide on how to build a trellis.

3) Arched Trellis or Arbors

Who doesn’t love a whimsical walk-through arched garden trellis? I know I do! You can definitely grow cucumbers vertically up an archway, though depending on the variety, the vines may not make it all the way over the top.

Cattle panel is a popular option to make a sturdy, long-lasting DIY arch cucumber trellis, which can be purchased in 16-foot lengths from a local tractor or farm supply store. The best to way to make a cattle panel arched trellis is to carefully bend and secure the wire panel between four t-posts (one at each corner of the arch) that are driven at least one to two feet into the ground. That, or securely connected between two raised garden beds. Once complete, the sides at the base of the arch should be spaced about 5 to 6 feet apart. See diagram below.

If you’re not up for DIY, there are many awesome pre-made garden arches or arbors to buy as well! We get our arched trellises at a local nursery (made locally from welded steel), but I also really love the similiar rustic look of this Jardin arched trellis.

Looking for more trellis ideas? Don’t miss our popular DIY tomato trellis, this awesome homemade blackberry or raspberry trellis system, or our simple and sturdy flat DIY trellis that can be used for a wide variety of climbing plants!

4) Pallet Cucumber Trellis

It’s incredibly easy to make a DIY cucumber trellis out of an old upcycled wood pallet. Even better, you can often find old pallets for free on Craigslist or Facebook marketplace! For the best results, choose a pallet that has fairly wide-spaced slats for good airflow, and so the fruit can easily hang down between.

To set it up, simply prop the pallet up on additional pieces of wood, the side of a raised bed, or cinderblock supports, leaning at about a 45 degree angle. A south-facing orientation is ideal. To allow the vines to easily climb and cling, secure several pieces of twine or string running vertically from the top to bottom of the pallet (opposite direction of the slats). My friend Tanya at Lovely Greens has a tutorial on how she makes her a DIY pallet cucumber trellis.

5) Lean-To Trellises

Much like the pallet idea, you can easily build a DIY lean-to cucumber trellis with an old wooden lattice or sturdy wire fencing (e.g. remesh or a section of cattle panel). Simply lean and secure the trellis structure up at an angle on sturdy supports. The higher the trellis is angled, the less space it takes up and the easier it will be to access and reach underneath to harvest cucumbers.

Here is an awesome pre-made lean-to style cucumber trellis option.

6) Cucumber Cage or Teepee

Cucumbers can be grown in tall cages, just like tomatoes! Using cages or teepee-like structures is ideal for growing cucumbers in pots or containers where a larger trellis may not fit. Use one slender tomato cage to support a single cucumber plant, or a wider, larger cage with a few cucumbers planted around the base. You can use a pre-made tomato cage for cucumbers or make one yourself.

To make an DIY cucumber cage, it’s easy to curl and secure wire fencing into a cylinder. Or, insert several garden stakes in a circle around the plant, and then add horizontal rows of string or twine going up every 6 inches around them. To make a teepee, join three or four garden stakes or pieces of bamboo at the top with twine going around them. Follow our guide on how to make a DIY tomato cage using remesh wire for an even larger, sturdier option

7) String or Netting Trellises

Last but not least, it’s easy to grow cucumbers up rows of horizontal or vertical string. See several ideas and photos below. The plants will use their tendrils to climb, though you may also need to gently lead the end of the vine around the string as well.

For instance, connect many rows of horizontal twine between t-posts or garden stakes, spacing the rows about every 6 inches up the stakes. Or, connect string vertically to an overhead support, and then anchor them in the soil at the base of the cucumber plants using landscape staples (or gently clip them to the main stem itself). My friend Karen shows exactly how she uses the vertical string method to train cucumbers here.

Instead of individual strings, you could also hang up mesh garden netting for the cucumbers to easily climb.

I hope you found some fun cucumber trellis ideas!

As you can see, there are SO many clever and easy ways to support cucumbers as they grow. Have fun getting creative! Please let me know if you have any questions or other interesting ideas in the comments below. Thank you for tuning in today. We wish you bountiful cucumber growing season ahead!

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