...off of my pepper plants.
...and off of the garden beans.
...and something ate the corn when it was 8 inches tall... sheared off the whole thing, and took the leaves.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
54 degrees at 6:30am on July 15th
Why does weather.com have a forecast of a low of 65 degrees today
Forecast Conditions
Today
Jul 15
Mostly Sunny
High 84°
Low 65°
when right now it is 54 degrees?
| Right Now for Lansdale, PA (19446) | |||||||||
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Building a Trellis for the garden
In hopes for great things this year in the garden, I wanted to have several solid trellis built. The hope, no the expectation is for tomato plants reaching for the sky and cucumbers and beans that climb until there's nowhere else to go. And I definitely want to give watermelons and even pumpkins the chance to grow off the ground. It'll be fun to see what these things will support.
I decided to build ones according to the square foot gardening design, using conduit and nylon garden webbing. And I figured I might as well go whole hog and try building ones that have rounded corners because I like things to be difficult. Rounded corners means bending pipe... which of course, I have never done. So I put myself in a learning on the job position and head to the store.
First, I needed to buy the conduit. After looking around, I decide on the 1/2 inch diameter because it seems like a strong enough width. I was looking for lengths of 5 feet. But when I was looking at the prices, this is what I saw.
The conduit was $1.77 for 5 feet.
Whereas the price for 10 feet of conduit was $1.65.
This bit of pricing wizardry aside, I learned quickly that it is pretty easy to cut conduit if you have a hacksaw, which I have. So, I bought pipe and a pipe bender, which was actually not cheap, I think it was around $40, so finding one to borrow would have been a better thing to do.
Making a Trellis
First, here were the materials I had.
10 10' lengths of 1/2" conduit
Pipe bender
Hacksaw
Measuring tape
Some 2x4s
Coupling (for holding the pipe together)
Next I cut the pipe into 5' lengths
After a test run bending one of the pipes, I found that 2.5 inches was the right length from the end at which to bend the pipe. So, I marked the end of each pipe 2.5 inches from the end and used a pipe bender (following the little attached instruction booklet and the example of student pipe bending videos on youtube). and voila! Bent pipe.
To bend the other side, I lined the first bent side up between 2 blocks of wood and did my best to keep it perpendicular to the floor, while I bent the other side.
While it was not a perfect method, it did make the 2 bends parallel enough for my purposes.
After the pipe was bent into a u-shape.
Then, I connected the U to 2 straight 5' lengths of conduit with the connectors.
And behold, the basic structure of the trellis
Setting it up
I have fewer pictures here. To set up the trellises, I put rebar into the ground next to the boxes to support the structure. In order to make sure that the rebar wasn't too bent, I tried fitting conduit over each one in the store before putting it in the cart. Once it was set up, I tied the netting on. I was able to find the netting at a local garden store called the Rhoads Garden but it is also think it is available online through burpee.com.
Here is a picture of a set up trellis after the netting has been tied on.
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