I’ve been gardening at my house for a couple of years now, but this year was the first time I gave a serious go to having some sort of veggie patch. Last year I had grown cherry tomatoes which were bountiful. (Shout out to ‘spoon tomatoes’ which make so many pea-sized tomatoes that I would just get bored of picking them.) But otherwise it was like, three sad jalapenos and a swiss chard in a pot with butter-knife-sized leaves. I got that ‘square foot gardening’ book which made me think I could get away with growing stuff in a little corner of my weird-shaped garden.

Starting out in March, I bought some tongue and groove car decking for 1 dollar a foot from our local salvage yard. I only had to sand some freaky tar off of it, and I treated the inside with food grade tung oil. I wanted to paint it a sage green on the outside, which looked great in our house, and turned into toothpaste outside… oh well. I lined the interior with polyethylene sheets, and stapled hardware cloth to the bottom and a few layers of thick cardboard to keep out weeds. I used these cement blocks for the corners, because I didn’t feel like screwing it all together, and an added bonus is it gives you a few extra inches on each side. The bed is 3×4 plus a bit, thanks to that. The bottom I filled up with some big branches, ripped up paper, and a few bags of autumn leaves that sat on my porch for a few months. I’m not Mr Moneybags so I didn’t spend hundreds of dollars on vermiculite for the famous ‘Mel’s mix’ and just used coconut coir, a local soil mix, mushroom compost, ‘steer-gro’, and a bag of perlite the size of  giant’s anime body pillow. The soil mix worked pretty good, I think. I heard dire warnings about perlite ‘floating to the top’ but I haven’t noticed that. I also wanted to avoid peat moss for environmental reasons, but then needed it for my blueberries and didn’t realize you only get that stuff in massive easy-chair-sized proportions. The coconut coir came in these dehydrated bricks that you soak in water and they expand, and boy they sure expand, so I had a giant plastic bin of coconut coir as a piece of furniture all season.

So next I drove some rebar through the holes in the blocks, and then cut some pieces of PVC pipe to cover them, though it wasn’t really effective for avoiding eyeball poking so I tried covering them with plastic pots which would humorously go flying off in the wind like a silent movie gag. I screwed pipe hangers on the insides of the bed, and bent more PVC to make these half hoops, and then covered them with some frost cloth through March. And thank goodness I did, as a freak snowstorm came in the middle of the month and tried to smush my baby peas… To repel slugs, I made a moat around my bed and filled with crushed hazelnut shells, which is a cheap byproduct you can buy at farm stores around here. Squirrels kept coming around and looking disappointed. I do find these shells to be pretty successful as I never saw a slug in the bed, and all the holes in the leaves seemed more likely from flea beetles who are but wimps. One time, a bit of my shade cloth had draped over the corner of the moat, and I woke up to find an intrepid snail had climbed it all the way to the top of the bed, but I sent him sailing into the lawn before he could reach his prize. The only bad thing about the shells is they embed in the bottom of your shoes and you only notice when you go tap dancing through your kitchen. They’ve lasted all year so far though I will probably want to refresh them in the spring. Less from them breaking down, and more from me kicking them all over the place. They did a decent job keeping weeds out (along with my usual cardboard layers), and only now are some freaks starting to appear at the corners.

At some point, I was able to start things growing… I started my lettuce inside, hardened it off, and got it in the bed. These lettuces all ruled – Henderson’s Black-Seeded Simpson lettuce, which I have to look up the order of those words every time I want to say it, Parris Island Cos lettuce (or some would say Cosm), and I dunno, some buttercrunch or something. They were all great. The Cos looked wimpy and pale green indoors but started rocking once it was in the bed for a while. They all got gigantic and we couldn’t eat them fast enough. In addition to these, I planted a bunch of snow and snap peas on one side to go up a trellis. Then, some carrots, radishes, spinach, bok choy, and I think some chard that never bothered to grow. Some rocket arugula did a passable job, but all the root vegetables and winter greens sucked and mostly bolted by like, May, before they were even edible. I let them grow tall and flower just to see what they looked like then I chucked them into the recesses of the yard to disintegrate in shame. I don’t even know what was up with these dorks, like I sowed them a million years earlier like before it even snowed, so what was the hold up? I also put in some nice calendulas and marigolds, though they all got powdery mildew at some point and then just looked like shit for the rest of year.

Here are some pictures of my stupid radishes.

So the ones on the bottom left were ‘french breakfast’ radishes from the dollar store, and they were the only ones that were even slightly edible. I was so excited seeing how big the tops of the other ones were, and those were my fancy gourmet ones, like watermelon radishes and whatever, and look at this bullshit. How are you going to have greens longer than my forearm and then have a root like a piece of dental floss, you losers.

I ate the greens, which were fine, and I even ate the stupid strings and they were not fine. The carrots are still sitting in my bed to this day and I don’t even want to face them at this point.

So I needed a trellis for my climbing vegetables, and I was originally going to use some fancy willow thing, but then I had this idea… I thought it would be cool to make a spiderweb for them to climb up, so this is the design I came up with. I installed more pipe hangers on the outsides of the bed, and hammered in more rebar to go through the hangers. Then I built this u-shaped frame out of stiff PVC (not the floppas I used for the hoops.) To attach the ropes, I drilled through both sides of the pipe, and ran sisal rope through and knotted it on the outside. I didn’t want it to get tangled up in the middle so I used a wooden macrame hoop at the center. Then I used thinner twine to create the web itself, just looping it around the thicker rope. It was pulling up on the bottom so I added some hooks to the side boards pull it back down and keep it flat. The PVC frame is then slid down over the rebar. I wasn’t sure if this would work, but it’s still standing months later, even in some fairly high winds, and plants have loved climbing up it. It cost maybe ten dollars in material, not including a special drill bit for plastic, and some brass finish spray paint for the PVC. I could’ve trimmed the ends of the ropes for a tidier look but I thought I might have to tighten them, and I did not. Before I knotted them off I sprayed it with the hose a few times then tightened them again, which helped. Oh I forgot to mention, I added some little solar lanterns to the tops of my other PVC lengths, and used electrical tape to keep them sealed. They look kinda fun at night and are mostly there to keep me from poking my eyes out on rebar and to smack into me when I’m trying to harvest peas.

Here’s a picture of it while I was mid web, where just the spokes were placed. We’d also added these trellises that ended up being too short to reach the ground so we just tied them on with yet more sisal, but they did pretty good. I tried zip tying them at the bottoms but my neighbor’s vicious dogs ripped the zip ties out which I witnessed. We had to put up this weird privacy cloth to hide the ugly chainlink fence and also these mutant dogs who would stick their tongues and nasty teeth through the fence trying to devise some way to bite me.

 

So this was my bed in spring, with the peas doing a nice job climbing up the trellis. I only had to pin them in a few spots. These were sugar snap peas from Ed Hume and I give them big ups. I also really like the scarlet runner beans from that brand, which are climbing up the trellis on the fence in my later pictures. I tried getting yellow solo cups from the dollar store and smearing them with vaseline as I heard it would catch bugs, and then I pinned them to skewers. They did stay in place amazingly, but I don’t know if they really caught much, or if you need to refresh the goo every day and I’m just not the kind of guy who wants to go apply vaseline to yellow cups every morning, sorry. These peas did so well that they were still pea-ing in summer, while my rattlesnake beans were waiting. I sowed the beans right in front of the peas, but those maniacs would not stop until sometime in July. Next year I will just cut off the pea factory sooner.

I wanted a place to put some hanging baskets for cherry tomatoes, so I bought these newel posts from the salvage yard for ten bucks, spray painted them blue, along with some weird pineapple finials I found there. These are screwed onto the back of the bed with l-shaped brackets. I thought about tying them to rebar for more support or adding a chain to keep them from pulling to the sides, but they actually end up fine without it, despite the tomato baskets weighing probably thirty pounds when they’re wet. Then because I had horror vacua, I added some IKEA pot hangers and put in some geraniums. While I waited for the temps to rise enough to leave my tomatoes outside, I just hung some nice flowers. I don’t really know if it was a great idea to put the tomatoes in hanging baskets, though they did ‘aight’, I’ll say.

 

So that leads me back to today. Or like, a week ago, I think. You see a bunch of my grow buckets that I covered with coffee bags from the salvage yard, and ran out of room for so now they’re just all in the way, and everything turned into a jungle. Now I’m growing rattlesnake beans on the trellis and some cucumbers that couldn’t be bothered to show up. Some lacinato kale and swiss chard I got as seedlings turned into monsters, and then there’s a bunch of basil, peppers, and the carrots I’m trying to not think about.

There’s still a bit more growing for the year, as I plan to plant a little corn salad in some empty spaces, and sow crimson clover to hang out over the winter. My grow buckets are doing well, this was the first year I grew big tomatoes – Alice’s Dream, Black Krim, and Orange Icicle… only got to try orange icicle so far, which were fine. Kind of a rip tho, as you only get maybe four tomatoes before the year is up, where the cherry tomatoes were flying until past Halloween and the leaves turned black in time for the spooky season. Next year I think I will try the lame cold weather greens again and start them indoors instead of in the bed LIKE THE SEED PACKET ADVISED (jerks.) Anyway, that was an interesting experience, and I liked building all this weird stuff. I’m amazed that nothing fell apart or was some awful idea that led to ruination or anything. I also learned that you will probably not get rat lung worm from a slug like, breathing on your plants but I still wash them anyway. Next time I may talk about my strawberry planters which was my first real carpentry project and only destroyed one power tool.