Now that the pole cutting is done, it's time to bring the poles back to where your shrub stands in your garden or lawn. You need to excavate the holes needed for installing the four forked poles -- the poles that will serve as vertical supports.

Step 6: Lay out four of your 6' crosspiece poles to form a temporary rectangle around your bush. This will serve as a guide for digging the four holes that you'll be putting the four forked poles into. Dig on the inner side of each of the four corners of your rectangular pole guide.

Step 7:

Excavate the four holes, to a depth of about 2'. Going down this deep will give your structure good support.

Step 8:

If excavating in rocky soil, you might find it difficult to go as deep as 2'. You can make your work a bit easier by whittling the bottoms of your four forked poles to a point. A pointed pole can easily be jammed down the hole an extra few inches. For this operation there is no good substitute for a hatchet.

Step 9:

Place the four forked poles in their holes. Use the V-notch as you would the sight on a rifle to line up the fork of one pole with that of another (see thumbnail at right). When those two are lined up, fill in their two holes with dirt, tamping the dirt down firmly every couple of shovel-fulls. You've now got the supports for one side finished. Now perform the same operation on the other side.

Step 10:

Lay a 6' crosspiece first on one side (see thumbnail at right), then on the other. The result will be four poles supporting two crosspieces that parallel each other.

Step 11:

Those first two crosspieces that you have laid will now serve as supports for the remaining four. Lay the remaining four on top equidistantly from each other, perpendicular to the first two crosspieces laid.

Step 12:

The structure is complete! All you need to do now is lay "roofing" over the crosspieces, such as pine or other evergreen boughs. This roofing will bear the brunt of winter's ice and snow, instead of the branches of your shrub. You've succeeded not only at protecting the bush, but also perhaps at cleaning up a "problem area" that was simply an eyesore on your property. And, assuming you already possessed the simple tools required for the project, it didn't cost you anything.

Tip 1:

For those who truly do not have a source of wood on their property, all is not lost. You may well know somebody who'd love to have you come over to their property and clean up the kind of "problem area" I've described. You'd then be able to haul back the wood that you need. Your other option is to buy lumber for the project (or scrounge around for some scrap lumber). The building process would be similar with lumber, except that you'd be using nails to hold the structure together.