Today was a sort of fix it day in the backyard vegetable garden. One of the things that bugged me about the spring veggies was the way the cucumbers sort of sprawled all over the place, quickly outgrowing the flimsy bamboo stakes I provided for growing upward. I’ve been wanting to expand the vegetable patch with four small 4×4 beds, because I don’t really have room to start fall veggies without tearing out spring. I built this lovely box to hold my fall cucumbers: 4×4, 10 inches high, with six feet of wire mesh trellis on either side, plus wire over the top. It’s hard to see here, but the front and back of the bed are open, with no wire. The cukes can grow up either side and over the top, shading themselves a bit, and making kind of a pretty green picture in the process. Perhaps next spring, I’ll add a second one of these, so I can grow pole green beans instead of bush, and then do fall cukes when the beans have had it.

The other thing that annoyed me this spring was that the tomatoes sprawled all over the place. I’ve been following Neil Sperry on Facebook, and he uses this type of wire cage for his tomatoes, but much larger. The two varieties I like best, Roma and Husky Cherry, don’t really get too wide, but tall and awfully branchy, so it’s been hard to wrangle them using stakes and ties. The leftover wire from the trellis made lovely cages, and I think I might have enough for one or two more. Fall tomato transplants are supposed to go into the ground this week, so I’ll be testing these out shortly.