Ok, I am sore. It was not simply a case of having my daughter follow me, handing me zip-ties and moving upside down buckets for me to stand on.
The wire, which I had come upon basically for free and I had used last year as the top wire that the mesh deer fencing was suspended upon had broken on three of the 4 sides of the fence, and horribly stretched on the 4th. It was wire for running an electric fence, and I guess it’s tensile strength was not enough. After walking the perimeter of it all, and assessing the situation I went inside my parents home to sit down and figure out what to do.
All of this was complicated by the report from my mother, that the field was basically free of snow. It had no snow on the very south side. The north side was still buried under several feet, and all of the grape vines were under copious amounts of snow as well. I was only able to find two of them. The rest are buried by ice and snow still and I will have to find and prune those later.
Finally, I came to the decision that regardless of what I had planned on doing, what I needed was a new top wire that would hold up, regardless of how much ice and snow collected on the fencing. A trip to the local farm and fleet store and I was the proud owner of a spool of 4000 feet of high tensile strength wire. I then went through the joys of stringing this myself. There was no way my 8 year old daughter could help wrangle a couple hundred pounds of steel, or the fence tool for tightening it, so it ended up simply being four hours of my muscling the spool through the snow and getting the top of all of the fencing restrung and fastened to all of the corner earth anchors and getting it all tightened down. Once that was finally done I pruned the vines I had found, brought them into my parents home, wrapped them in wet paper towels, packed them into plastic bags, and laid down for an hour with my pants and socks in the clothes dryer (lots of snow) before eating and heading home.
So not what I planned for the day, and more work done without all of the results I had hoped for. Attaching the fencing itself with zip-ties to the top wire will have to wait for the fencing to thaw out of the ice and snow still on the ground there. The entire time a huge flock of turkeys and a deer were watching from across the road.
photo by Jaison Justus
Upon my return home, I found Patti in the kitchen working at cooking down the 8 gallons of maple sap the tree in our front yard gave up today. When done, that will be about a quart of syrup. Wonder how much the tree will give up tomorrow?
Well, you know me, garden freak that I am, this post makes me super super etxecid!Okay, first thing to remember is DO NOT OVER WATER. Only if the plant is actually wilting do you want to water it, especially when it comes to tomatoes. There’s an old saying that goes something like this, tomatoes thrive only in adversity’, so give them as much sun an as little water as you can.