After flaffing about not being able to decide how to construct the trellis for my backyard and worrying about potential costs and how ugly it might be and whether it will do what I want it to do. I pulled my finger out and have built it on the weekend. The answer came to me in the guise of fence railings sourced at $14 for a 7 metre length. Individual flag poles at 3.5m (or $7) in height per hop planting!
Top of 'flagpole' trellis at left, bottom at right.
Note that there is nothing in the horizontal plane so the dammed birds don't have anything to sit and shit on (except for the 50mm end at the top) -an important design consideration for me. I welded and sealed with cold gal. I fixed two plates (to the right in photo above) to teck screw it to the horizontal rails of the fence. The top end of the tube is flattened and welded with 3/4 of a single chain link welded to it to thread the hoisting rope through; a ghetto pulley if you will.
Now as the hop flowers ripen, I can lower the whole 3.5m down, one variety at a time to harvest them; no ladders needed. I have tied 5 lengths of thick jute twine to the garden bed (on the one to the right) and the other end go up to near the top where they're hoisted up by a bit of telecom rope through the chain 'pulley'. If I want to add more twine I can just untie the rope from the fence, lower the lot down, attach more and hoist it back up to tension it - flagpole style. I have yet not added jute twine to the middle or left flagpoles.
I will have 4 poles across this side (where you can see three in the photo above) and a fifth one around the corner to the left. They are spaced at just under two meters apart. The wooden stakes are for tomatoes, for some reason the stakes all went in crooked, it must have been how I was holding my tongue.
