Bender

Square foot gardening is a very cheep and easy system. Much thought must have gone into the best and cheapest way to do things. 


One of the parts is vertical gardening for Tomatoes and melons etc. 


Mel suggests that 1/2 inch Electrical Conduit is used for the vertical supports. They call it EMT over here. 


I wanted to make a serious Tomato trellis this year as I did not have long enough poles last year and it was a pain trying to keep tying them onto poles all the time. The poles were 6 foot - but a foot of that was in the earth (at least). The plant probably could have gone up to 8ft if it was given the right attention. Instead the plants just flopped over. Then we had strong winds... that really messed things up - with plants falling over and being uprooted. 
I used iron rebars last year for the tomatoes, but this year I am going 8ft and I will be pruning a bit more aggressively also. Hopefully this structure will hold up to the winds also...


I also want to apply this to some pole bean plants I was to plant. 


Anyway - back to the bending. 


EMT is CHEAP! we are talking just over $2 for 10ft of 1/2 inch EMT - and it is pretty strong pipe. I am sure it is coated with zinc - so hopefully will resist rust. 
What is not so cheep is the corner fixings. For each corner I was going to buy an L Shaped corner piece. 


For what I wanted to build - that was about 12 corner bits. At over $4 each that worked out to around $50! Just on bends! Anyway - they had a pipe bender there for about $30. 


It was a no brainer - it was cheeper to bend the pipes myself - though a little scary as I had not done this for a while. And what if I messed up?


I am so glad I found some instructions online - as I was going to try and 'work this out' myself. 


I found some instructive vids on YouTube which helped me. I did not know I had to use my foot with the pipe bender!

The main Issue is knowing what the Arrow, Star and Tear symbols mean. 

I found some good instructions on line from Albany Tech College. 

For a back to back bend like above, it takes a little bit of math. By the way - the bit of pipe above is made out of a whole 10ft of pipe. Notice that the height of the frame is the same both ends? 

The width is 54 inches and the height is 3ft (36 inches). This is what I planned. 

If you add up all the planned values above, you end up with 125 inches. But with a ten foot bit of pipe - that is only 120 inches  - so where did the extra 5 inches come from? (I hear you ask!).

Well you gain 5 inches from the first bend. On the first bend I placed the arrow at the 30.5 mark (that is 35.5 minus the 5 inches I gain). I got 36 inches hight - including the pipe width.  

Now I had to balance that up against a wall and bend the other end hoping the first bend is still pointing upwards exactly straight.  I measured 54 inches and used the star marker on the bender. This gave me the other 36 inches for the second leg. 

I figured out you can be very accurate with a pipe bender once you figure out what on earth is going on. 

So I recommend the pipe bending method - as it is not only cheaper than buying all the L-Shaped bends - but it makes stronger structures. One bit of pipe is stronger that three bits of pipe with bends screwed onto it. 

Here is a photo of all my metal structures!