Click to Enlarge

Meg has a fantastic eye for photography. She pulled this shot off with our little Canon point and shoot (I can't wait to see what she does with a real camera). When I get to see the pics at the end of the day it completely changes how I see the composition of our garden. It really is pretty cool and I am so grateful for it.

By the way, this photo is taken through the bean lines on our new trellis and the object in the background is the flag pole. Oh yeah, we got a new pirate flag (two years of flight shredded the last one). I think it looks like the mast of a ship.

Companion Planting and a Flashy New Trellis

The tomatoes are in. The bed in the photo is 4' by 18'. There are eight tomato plants (a little less than half our stock) in the bed, which I know isn't very many, but they will be sharing the space with four varieties of poling beans, red onions, leeks, and a shit load of basil. Well, maybe not a shit load, but a fare amount none the less.

We're really happy with how well our new trellis turned out. The design is mostly from something Meg found on the internet and in the latest issue of Organic Gardening. However, the modifications are all Future House. It did take us a few hours to build, but it's nothing more than bamboo from our property and salvaged string (the whole thing didn't cost a cent). I'm certain that by the end of this year I'll be able to tie knots like a sailor (which is fitting, because I tend to curse like one).

New Shoots

Early May is when tons of little alien spiky things grow out of our yard and begin to turn into bamboo. Kelly likes to kick them over and our landlord likes to eat them, but I just think they're kind of nice looking.

Pea sprouts! ...But not where we expected them.

At the top of our stairs is a gigantic bamboo plant that I've had for about four years. It's in a nice, big pot and in the morning I'll sometimes dump coffee grounds or eggshells or other compost-y stuff in the dirt. Last month, when I shelled the peas we'd been drying since the fall, I threw all the stems and leaves and empty pea pods in the bamboo pot.

As I was coming upstairs today, I saw this:


I guess I missed some peas.

Got deer? Got bamboo?

Then sharpen the bamboo into spears and kill the deer! Or build a fence.

Deer have been stomping around our garlic patch and threatening to turn our tidy rows of bulbs into mush. We don't really want venison that's been raised on the neighbors' ChemLawn grass and Miracle Gro shrubbery, so we decided against the sharpened spears and went with a fence instead.

There is nothing the deer particularly want from the garlic garden—it just provides a convenient shortcut for them to take when they move from chewing off the tops of our blueberry bushes to rolling around on the herbs. Our fence basically needed to provide enough of a barrier that the deer would walk around the garden rather than through it, so we planned a fence that would be tall enough to keep them from jumping over it.

The first order of business was a trip to the bamboo forest.


Bamboo will be the first thing we plant at future house. We use it for practically every single garden project we do, and it's plentiful, cheap, and pretty. The above picture was taken yesterday—while the rest of the area is still in gray and brown winter mode, the bamboo is a nice cheery green, like it always is. We chopped down about a dozen tall pieces and dragged them over to the garlic, where we proceeded to attach 6-foot bamboo poles to metal stakes and pound them into the ground around the perimeter of the garden.

Then we took looong pieces of bamboo and tied them to the uprights, parallel to the ground, so they went the whole way around the garden (minus opening we left at one corner). We ended up with sort of a bamboo split-rail fence. For extra insurance we ran pieces of twine between the bamboo, so that the deer won't be tempted to climb through the gaps.


Now, let's hope it works.

Without a Net

There's a bit of a sparkle out there today. Everything is covered in ice and hunched beneath the weight. The feeling of panic from a lot of folks is inescapable. I guess there are tree limbs falling, power lines breaking, and roads getting slick, but it still looks pretty just the same.

The weight of the ice was the first winter test for the new chicken pen. As I said in an earlier post, we gave the ladies a canopy made out of netting used to cover fruit trees. Another alternative is deer fencing as you can see at Fast Grow the Weeds. We went with the fruit tree stuff because it's tough as nails and there was an abandoned section of it in the lower shed. There's nothing wrong with a little harmless pillaging.

By the way, if you're smart about your materials you can do some impressive things for a modest price. The total amount we spent on coop, pen, and chickens came out to a smidge less than $200.

Back to the ice. So, the amount of ice we got here is pretty average for an ice storm in our area. As you can see there is a noticeable increase of sag, but the bamboo supports are holding up well.

Walk Softly...

and carry a big stick.

One of the projects from this weekend was to find a replacement flag pole for the Jolly Roger. Sadly our garden has been flagless for a month or so due to some serious flower power.

This was our first year trying to grow flowers and we thought it would be cool-lookin' to have something vining up the flag pole. Morning glories sounded pleasant and the seed packet said they would grow about 12 feet. Our flag pole was about 20 feet so we though it would be perfect. Shortly after what we thought would be the last frost, we planted a few seeds at the base of the pole and hoped for the best.



A few months later we realized that the seed packet seriously underestimated the potential of the morning glories. They grew to the top of the pole and were reachin' for more. The pole was about 2.5 inches in diameter, that heft went a good ways up, and we thought it would surely hold.



We were wrong. Meg went out to feed the chickens one morning and noticed something was off. It wasn't windy the night before but the sheer weight of the foliage snapped the pole in half. If we were to replace the pole then, we would have had to cut out the remaining morning glories and we were gonna have none of that. So, we had to wait for them to do their thing, which is a gift to see when going out for morning chores, and then die off.



After they croaked, Meg and I went to the bamboo patch at the end our our property and cut us a fresh new pole. We're planning to let it dry flat and will hoist the Jolly Roger come Spring.