Thank you guys!!!
Wow, I'm impressed. That cage, is that all 2x4 lumber? Are the posts anchored in the ground or is that whole thing movable? Nicely done, you wouldn't have taken any pictures through the building process, would you? I'd like to see them.
The cage is all 2x4 lumber, yes, except for the roof (which we did out of 1x1s that we planed from our 2x4s), and the door itself, which is made of 2x2s that we planed from our 2x4s.
The 2x4s are sitting in post holes, but they are not anchored in cement or anything of the like. We had several issues doing this. One of which is that a gas line and electrical conduit lines and another pipe ran right exactly where we wanted to put the cage. So we had to bury it less deep than we originally wanted to. Because we live right below a mountain pass, we regularly (I mean, weekly) get winds here from 40mph to 70 mph. So it had to be sturdy enough to not snap in the wind. Luckily, because it is backed up against one of our machine shops (a big metal building), and the north side is blocked by a big concrete wall, it's pretty sheltered from the wind. I mean, it still GETS wind, but it's more sturdy than it would otherwise be, even though it's only buried about 12 inches down below the ground. And, just because you didn't ask, but I should say it - we used 1"x1" square wire mesh that they use for drywall backing as the cage material. I got a 150 ft x 39 inch roll of it from the local building supply for $30. Which beats the hell out of anything that Home Depot or Lowe's wanted to sell me under the auspice of it being "for gardens". We only ended up using one roll for the entire cage. And since we used left over lumber from our own yard, the entire cage ended up costing less than $100.
As for the building process - ask and ye shall receive.
Because of the odd width of the cage material, we had to make these in 39" panels like so:
Because of the number of pipes that were in the ground, the ends of these ended up being cut down quite a bit from where they are in the above pic.
When we first started building it, we thought we'd just staple the roof material on without using panels, as you see in the pic below. That didn't work out well at all - the material wasn't tight, and it looked terrible. Also - because of the electrical panel in the back, one of the panel's middle beam had to be raised up - you can see that in this pic as well.
As you can see, for the entire thing, all we did was build one panel at a time, and then put it in and nail it (with a nail gun) to its neighbor panels.
The cage when it was finished, but before I got anything in (except the roses):
The roses (I have red and yellow climbers) use the outside of one end of the cage as a trellis:
And you've seen the most recent pics.
TW designed it, we both built it, and I planted the garden (and will tend it).
