Backyard beds green up in late April
When we visited Mr. Fix it’s mother last weekend, I asked her about the peas and salmon.
She assured me the fresh peas we would be harvesting would be sweeter and much better eating
than the canned peas my mother served, or the frozen peas my husband keeps (sometimes for years) in the freezer.
I’ll buy that.
peas begin to climb
One thing I will say as I watch the peas stretch their tendrils looking for something to wind around,
the first strand of twine may be too high.
I find myself unwinding the peas from each other,
but they are still not tall enough to grab the first rung in our trellis twine.
Next time I will advise we make the first strand about 4 inches from the surface of the soil.
Jim made notches at about 1 foot intervals for the twine to lay nicely into the poles.
It made me wonder if we’d be compromising the strength of the poles in high winds,
but really bad storms came through last week, and the trellis made it through just great.
Hardware list for trellis:
Mr. Fix it says he went to Ace hardware to get 1×1x6 posts.
He marked on each post, every 1 foot and notched the corners out with a dremel tool.
The top is framed in by 1×2 posts sized to fit the dimension of our pea bed… about 1 ft. by 3 foot.
Then he added one diagonal piece across the top to keep is sturdy.
We set it in about one foot into the ground (pounded in with a mallet).
Jute twine finished things up.
We’ll show you how the peas grow.
The next project will be to set up our very first drip irrigation system for our pole beans on the hot-hot side yard.
We moved our original brown rain barrel to the front of the house in an elevated spot at the end of the side yard veggie garden.
Then we searched the web to find out how you might set up drip irrigation from rain barrel water, which is “dirty.”
Drip depot line and filter on barell
This is what we found:
Drip Depot’s dirty water gravity drip kit
This has a nice long main line that we ran down the side of the house, and when the time is right (a couple of weeks)
we’ll put small individual drip line connectors onto the main line for every single plant. That’s a lot of short little hoses.
I sure hope it works. It was a real pain trying to use a hose from the barrel last season.
I had to move it to every plant and it took forever for me to water in the mornings before work.
This summer I hope I can just turn the nozzle and go back inside to fix my hair while the system waters the beans and squash.
We’ll document how that goes.
