First up, I’m happy to saw we actually got rain last night! After all those ours of the weather maps and apps saying we were getting rain, while not a drop was falling from the sky, it was wonderful to finally hear the sound of a good downpour, in the wee hours.
The down side was that I was awake during the wee hours, after trying to get to bed early! Ah, well.
My goal in the garden for today was to get those two beds covered with netting. I forgot to take pictures for most of it, though.
The first bed I covered was the garlic bed.
After filling in some of the holes dug by the cats during the night. In the process, some of the garlic has had their tips broken off. I’m hoping they will recover!
This bed has shorter support posts on it, and I wanted to use some black netting we have to cover it. I had some cut to size for past garden us, rolled up on a narrow fence post. I figured it wouldn’t take long to cover the bed.
It turned out to be too short. By only about 2-3 feet!
After securing it as far as it could reach with ground staples, I dug around and found another pre-cut length that I hoped was quite short. It wasn’t, but that just means a fair bit of the bed has a double layer of netting over it.
For the other bed, I was wanting to use the mosquito netting I reclaimed from the chain link fence. It was more than long enough.
It wasn’t wide enough.
Which would have been okay. All I needed to do was push the supports deeper into the soil until they were low enough for the netting to cover the sides.
The problem, however, was rocks. I kept trying to hammer the supports deeper, even pulling a few out to reposition them, but there was only so far I could go. Though I used a piece of wood on the tops to protect them, but sometimes I had to just hammer directly on them. Which, of course, damaged the tops.
Eventually, though, I had to give up. There was just no way I could get all of the supports deep enough into the soil for the mosquito netting to be able to cover the top and sides. So that got rolled up and put away, and I found more of the netting I’d used on the garlic bed.
This netting tears very easily, though, so I wanted to protect it where it came in contact with the supports. I’d picked up a pool noodle for something else, so I took a break to take care of that project, then cut up what was left of the pool noodle to make protectors on the supports.
Slits were cut to fit over the twine. The first photo above is a corner, while the next is of one of the side supports.
The next photo is of the summer squash bed, after the netting was fastened in place. If I’d used this netting in the first place, I wouldn’t have had to hammer the supports lower, and there wouldn’t have been so much slack on the sides. But that’s okay. As long as it’s pegged down and no cats can get under it, it should be fine.
The last photo is the garlic bed. Before putting the netting on, I lightly scattered mulch over the garlic, but not the end of the bed that has winter sown seeds at the far end. You can see where I added a couple of sticks to support the twine near one end. That’s near where the first section of netting ended. The two sections overlap by several feet.
I’m glad I got this job done when I did, because things got really windy again.
So this should keep the cats out of the beds. The problem is, the cats will try and jump on top of it. I caught Syndol doing that with the hoop covers on the bed at the chain link fence. That netting can better handle such a thing. If a cat jumps on this netting, it’ll probably tear. The black netting is harder to see, too. I’m thinking of finding something shiny that I can attach to the netting to make it more visible, but will also flash in the sunlight and scare off any critters.
This is pretty much it for garden related stuff today. My husband has some forms from the pain clinic he’d filled out that needed to be mailed, so I took advantage of that to head out and run some errands. With Easter in a few days, things were really busy, but that stuff I needed wasn’t going to wait until next week.
Hard to believe half of April is gone already.
Where has the time gone??
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 