Vertical Gardening

Hours were spent last year cutting young ash trees to use for trellis supports.  Many more hours were spent patiently weaving twine back and forth between the supports into netting for pole beans.  Not this year.
This year I bought ready-made reusable nylon netting 5'x30' and tied it onto 8' rebar stakes.  Total investment was about $60 and 2 hours.  This is the difference between knowledge and wisdom.

The rebar was re-purposed from the hops field where Jim, Wu and I (mostly Jim and Wu) have spent the past week installing over fifty 24' poles to support the aerial cables.  Our task is now to install the cables and run rope down to each hop plant so that the bines will grow skyward.  The whole enterprise looks awfully strange from the road and I'm sure the neighbors and passing traffic are wondering what the hell we're doing.

Quite a few of the potatoes have now sprouted and the peas are generally 4"-6" tall.  I re-potted tomatoes and cabbages yesterday afternoon in my kitchen garden.  Speaking of the kitchen garden,  I did a bad thing about two weeks ago.  After cleverly bending conduit and stretching plastic over the entire raised bed to create a hoop house, I failed to anticipate how hot it could get on the inside with direct sunlight.  Within 24 hours I succeeded in killing all the lettuce that had so far sprouted, three-quarters of the peas, all of the onions I started back in March, and about half of the cabbage.  Boy did I feel stupid.  Fortunately it is early in the season and I just replanted everything.  Lesson learned.

Having lost all my onions I ordered 6 bunches (~360 seedlings) of Super Star onions from Berlin Seed.  About 30 of them are planted in my kitchen garden (4/23) and the rest are planted at the farm (4/18).  The onions at the farm were planted every other row and I plan to place rows of tomatoes interspersed with the onions.  Jim went to the Joint Vocational School (JVS) on Thursday and picked out the tomato and pepper plants he ordered back in January.  I hope to make a trip down to the Mt. Hope produce auction soon to buy cucumber, broccoli, and maybe a few other vegetables.  I wonder if they sell netting?