Life....

Wow it's been 2 weeks since I've written.  Sorry, but sometimes life gets in the way of blogging.. about life:)

While I've not been writing, I have been doing & taking pics.  It'll take a few posts to actually catch up, but that's ok I SHOULD be able to do a bit more posting this week.  Hey guys, it's a garden - it grows, slowly... so this isn't going to be the daily post anyway.  Although I do hope to post at least weekly.

So, there was the problem with the raccoon & mockingbird & the tomatoes... here's what we had done.

Amy & Oscar

Notice how it slopes on the right side & we had put in some pvc pipe to keep the tomatoes from being squished by the netting.

That didn't work out as well as we hoped.  The birds really appreciated the pvc pipe as it gave them a place to land while they pecked at the ripe tomatoes though...

 Here's what it looks like now.  We added some netting to the front, as well as putting in conduits on the front of the beds, thus keeping the netting from being directly on the plants.  This is working really well. YEA!

Amy & Oscar

Most beds though are not so close together & remember we only care about covering the ones with tomatoes.  Next year I will not be putting anything but tomatoes in the covered beds.  This year however Oscar (on the right) has a cantaloupe in the front & Amy (left) has beans...  Again - experiment!

For covering a single bed (we did 3 of those) we had to add the front conduit, then cover with the netting.  We did it 3 different ways (duh - wouldn't you?) the best way we found was to cut a length of  netting for the top, like so.  You can see that the netting doesn't have much over lap on the long ends of the bed, but the short ends have a lot of netting hanging.

We then cut another length & wrapped it completely around the bed.  We then stitched the 2 pieces together.

Julia w/netting - LOOK AT THE BAY TREE!

If you look on the left side you can see the stitching up toward the top, it's that way on 3 sides.  The reason you don't see any on this side is because we were able to stretch the TOP netting to one side (remember how we had all that extra length) & stitch up from the bed.  Thus the stitching here is right next to the conduit.  Sounds complicated, but works really well.  We have extra on the bottom, that we will be able to tent out (more pics in another post) so the plants don't grow through the netting.

So, how do we get into them.... Raise up the side & voila!

Julia

I used the long ka-bob sticks to hold the netting up - works like a champ!