How to Make a Bamboo Teepee Support

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Why? Because I've developed a garden variety obsession with growing in containers and needed to make one for myself. It was easy, fun and cheap so of course I thought of you.

I happened to have a whack of bamboo stakes in my potting shed which is why we're making this tepee (teepee? tipi? tee pee?) support out of bamboo stakes. You can use whatever sturdy but bendy wood you have on hand.

Which I assume are bamboo stakes.

You'll also need some twine. Go get those and I'll wait here.

Or just sit there like you seem to be doing.

I got a late start on my pot obsession this year; it started well after I had planted my flower seedlings, so I didn't have a huge selection of flowers to try in them.

I didn't have a huge selection of pots either but thanks to local reader Jody I at least got a few terra cotta and clay pots to start my clay pot collection. She gifted me 5 of them.

On my way home from picking them up my head nearly shot off the top of my neck when I saw a HUGE and beautiful terra cotta pot out for the garbage. YES I turned the car around and YES I did so illegally because FREE CLAY POT.

People are so stupid. This thing had to have been sitting out on the sidewalk all day and no one took it. I made my way back, stopped the car on the street - also illegally - and sprung out to claim my prize which I worried would be too big to fit in my car - which was already full of clay pots.

As luck would have it, it would fit perfectly into my car because it was in 7 separate broken pieces, propped together. With no bottom.

I hopped back in my car with no clay pot and a grudge against whoever put that pot out there like that.

The first thing I needed to get planted out this spring was lettuce and sweet peas, so the first container I did was going to need a support for the sweet peas to climb up.

The issue I ran into was the fact that my bamboo stakes were shorter than I needed for the 6' high sweet peas. If that's the case for you, this is how to fix bamboo stakes that are too short.

Bamboo splits very easily, so to make a longer bamboo cane just push the small end of one cane into the larger end of another cane.

Push it in hard so it's set in a few inches, then wrap it tightly with twine. It's surprisingly strong and holds perfectly.

You can see here how much taller you can make a stake. You can also see how badly I need to redo my back deck.

If your bamboo stakes are too short, this will take care of that without having to go out and buy more stakes.

Make a Bamboo Teepee Support

Materials

4-8 bamboo stakes depending on the size of your plant or container
Twine or bendy wood like vines or willow branches
Scissors

Twine is the easiest to use for holding the bamboo stakes together, but vine or bendy branches looks nicer. Make sure your bamboo stakes are as tall as you need them, plus an extra foot or more to insert into the soil of the container.

Stick your stakes in evenly around the perimeter of the pot, or if you're using a huge pot, around the perimeter of the plant you want to wrangle. Stakes need to be in at least 1' of soil to be good and stable.

Pull all the tips together and tie them with twine.

Don't worry about fancy knots, just get them tied together.

The length of each piece of twine needs to be 3X the circumference of the teepee.

Wrap your twine once around the teepee where you're going to add the twine and then cut a piece that's 3X that length. This will give you the right amount of twine for your first support tie.

Once you have your 3x length, fold the twine in half and loop it around a bamboo stake like this.

Pull the string to the next support.

Wrap it around the outside of the stake.

Then pull it through the centre of your double strand of string.

Make sure it's tight but then do the same thing on the next bamboo stake.

Continue all the way around until you get to the start again.

ALERT - You can just tie and wrap around the stakes however you want, this is just what I did on this particular day. Another day I might do it completely different because I'm unpredictable like that. You do you.

Once you're at the end, tie it off and then cut all the twine tails.

What I don't like about twine is the fact that it runs in straight lines. Not a huge deal since it will generally get covered with foliage.

If you use vines or branches, they'll look round. Vines also just looks more better. Yep. More better.

However, it's easier to find and work with twine than vines and branches. I happen to have 2 large honeysuckle vines which I can always pull monster vines out of when I need them for making a wreath or this sort of thing so that's what I used for the first teepee support.

If you have vines you can use, this is how I secured mine around the bamboo poles.

It's a criss cross thing. Again, you don't have to do it this way, this is just how I did it. Make sure the support stays in place. It needs to be secure and strong enough to stand up to the relentlessly bossy vines growing up it through the summer.

Since I didn't have a ton of flowers to experiment with I planted lettuce in a lot of the pots.

I only discovered in the last couple of years that the one thing I should grow at home, and not in the vegetable garden I have to drive to, is lettuce.

Since I didn't have the flowers I needed to fill some of the pots I went with all the lettuce plants I grew, plus a few I bought.

Lettuces

Romaine ~ Coastal Star
Iceberg ~ Paonia
Green leaf ~ Bauer
Red leaf ~ Merlot

To harvest the lettuce, I just pluck off the outer leaves leaving the rest of the plant to grow. Lettuce will keep producing until the heat and humidity convinces it to bolt. When lettuce gets a long shooting stalk, it has bolted and the growing leaves will be bitter.

The big experiment with this most recent teepee support I made is the fact that I'm trying to corral a Supersweet 100 tomato plant with it.

I predict it will not be successful and the tomato plant will burst out of it like the Incredible Hulk by the middle of July.

I am implementing one very advanced gardening technique with these containers though to keep them flourishing.

I'm going to try watering them regularly, not just when they look like they're ready for end of life care.

Also tucked into the pots are dahlias, cosmos, alyssum, and a few other random annuals which I'll show you more of once they make their flowering debuts.