Trellising.

This really should have been done a month ago, back when the squashes and maters went in the ground. But it didn’t. Some years are like that.

It took until June Something-or-other even to get Bed 2 weeded this year.

Once the weeds were pulled out then we had to mound it up, throwing the old composted pathway up onto it to make a deeper bed.

Once it was mounded, we poured the rest of our buckwheat seeds on it. There are two reasons for this. One is I don’t have time and bandwidth for another work intensive crop, but I need something to hold the soil. Buckwheat is pretty straightforward, sprouts vigorously, fixes nitrogen, and, if you cut early, makes a great living mulch. The other reason is that we have a friend who is experimenting with gluten free. If she has success with last year’s buckwheat crop, we can harvest this for her in a few months.

This is the seed we harvested last year, but didn’t winnow, so it makes a great, cheap fast buckwheat bed.

Then we had to build the trellises for the tomatoes and cucurbits. The easiest trellis for squash is a cattle panels anchored on one row and bent over to touch the edge of the next row.

With all the T-posts in place we will be able simply to inch worm them down the garden for the next six years before we have to carry them back to this row again.

Squirrel! Look at our Elderflower tree! This thing is loaded!

We didn’t have enough cattle panels to trellis the whole row, so…

A trip to our favorite farm store. Fortunately, they were having a sale on cattle panels, so we plussed up on 5 of them.

This gives us 6 panels bent over in a hoop, followed by another set longways for the cucumbers, which never grow that tall anyway.

Winnie says “Daddy! I am hungry, I need a snack.”

Here, try a radish.

She’s not sure how she feels about that.

We put paper down between the legume row and the wheat row, but I haven’t had time to put the wood chips on it yet. The wheat is pretty well ready to harvest, but if you look in the middle there is a whole section that got knocked down in a rain shower. This is mostly because it had been overgrown by bind weed, and the mass of weed and wheat was too heavy and broke down the stalks. It is so hard to stay ahead of bind weed.

Ellie helped train the squash to grow up the trellises.

Evie helped prune and train the tomatoes up their strings.

And Seppi found a great way to make more wood chips.

BTW, “Toad in the Hole” is a fun and easy breakfast.

It’s basically just egg on toast, but it is in shapes, so it is fancy.