Gardener Transforms Old Bike Tires Into A Fantastic Trellis With An Impressive DIY

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If you've ever found out too late in a growing season just how inadequate your garden trellises are, you might be now looking for a better solution. Trellises come in every shape and size, but the sturdy ones that you need cost money, while the cheap ones don't always do the job. For many homeowners, the answer is to build their own, which is what gardener and YouTuber Grow Family Network did. He shows the steps to transform an old bike wheel (sans tire) into a DIY trellis using a method you may have seen before. There are, in fact, several different ways to build trellises from bicycle wheels, depending on what you're growing and the materials you have on hand.

Any bicycle wheel headed for the junkyard or trash bin will work for this DIY, and sometimes you can use more than one. The rubber tire is the part that gets thrown away, and as long as the rim is intact and the spokes are attached to the hub, you're set. Basically, the rim is mounted horizontally on top of a post or a pole, which can be made from materials like metal conduit, sections of old galvanized pipe, rebar, broken mop handles, or PVC pipe.

Make sure any post you use is set in the ground or packed in a planter. You can even anchor them in concrete if you want a more permanent solution. Then, run some strings from the outside of the bike rim down to the ground for your plants to climb on.

There are a lot of stylish ways to repurpose bike wheels in your home or garden, including different methods for making trellises. The basic technique of mounting them horizontally and running rope, wire, or twine down to the ground to guide your plants can also be used several ways. Whether you use one wheel or two, make sure the wheels are fixed so they don't spin and harm your plants.

Posts should be secured to hold the weight of the plant you're trellising and any fruit that it bears. Vegetables like tomatoes, peas, and beans can produce several pounds each, while trellises for plants like dragon fruit need to support a few hundred pounds (at least). Your guide lines and the support for the wheel should also take the plant's weight into account. A heavy-duty 4-inch PVC pipe set in concrete can hold a lot more than a mop handle, for example, and if you drill a hole in a 4-inch cap and bolt the bike rim to it, it can be glued right to the pole.

Other gardeners use more than one bicycle wheel. One way to do that is to thread the hubs onto a length of threaded rod, with a nut on either side of each hub to lock them in place. Leave a couple of feet at the end to bury in the ground, then drive it in so the bottom wheel sits on the soil, and run your lines spoke to spoke.

Many gardeners who need a trellis build it for a specific type of plant, and all parts of it should fit both the space and the plants. As said, the guide strings can be made from thin garden string to nylon twine to galvanized wire, but the key is that it's suitable for the plant you are growing. And actually, so long as you have a strong stake, you could even use this bicycle idea without the guide strings to support plants that grow in a hill system, like raspberries and blackberries. 

A bicycle wheel trellis can be scaled down for planters, too. To do this, mount a bicycle rim on a broken broom handle, and insert it into a plastic pot. Fill it with soil to keep it stable, then drill holes evenly around the rim of the planter to tie off the guide strings. 

Circular design is having a moment in both homes and gardens, and a bicycle wheel trellis is one way to use circles in your landscaping. You can personalize your bike wheel trellises in various ways, whether it's by using different wheel sizes or spray painting the rims for color. You could also adorn the trellis with beads, crystals, seashells, stained glass ornaments, or ceramic charms, or attach a scrap of wood for a plant marker. If you build the trellis's post sturdy enough, the flat, horizontal wheel can even hold a planter of trailing flowers right on top.