Don’t let this ball of adorableness fool you!

This is a ferocious and destructive little beast!

Yesterday, I fixed up the mesh covered beds with the fall spinach, making sure to peg down the sides of the netting so the kittens couldn’t get under.

This morning…

Well… they didn’t get under it.

*sigh*

When I came out, there were kittens sitting on the mesh, looking at me.

I took this photo after I’d taken out all the pegs. The mesh needed more support, but I don’t have any more of the metal stakes I used to slide the hoops over.

What I did still have were some pieces from the canopy tent a piece of tree had fallen on last year. Most of the pieces from the dismantled frame are being used around various garden beds, but there were two longer pieces that had snapped near their middles that were still around, leaving me with four lengths with one rough end.

So I stuck them in the spaces between the hoops, broken ends into the soil, thinking maybe I could lash or zip tie hoops to them. Which wouldn’t be very stable, but as I pushed the pieces into the soil, I remembered that they all have screw holes at the ends. I’ve been using those holes to threat twine through.

So that’s what I did. After lashing the bamboo poles back across the hoops, I began stringing twine through and across the metal pieces, the hoops and the poles.

With kittens rolling around, playing in the netting, rolling across the bed, and generally getting underfoot.

I could see that some spinach from the first sowing had started to germinate, and the seedlings are all flattened.

*sigh*

Well, at least the netting has enough support to keep it from collapsing.

For now.

As I was cleaning up and about to put things away, something odd in the path caught my eye.

This was just sitting in the dirt in the path.

It wasn’t there yesterday.

It is not ours. The girls and I don’t have anything like this. Which means it is probably something that was left among my parents’ stuff, though I don’t recall ever seeing it before. Where it came from and how it got into the path of the old kitchen garden is a mystery!

The Re-Farmer