Upon the advice of a trusted fellow urban farmer, I've made some security for the beds, since I've had some issues with rabbits in the past. The cages that he made were made out of "ratwire" which is about 1/2" square wire mesh. You can see them in the bottom right of this picture:
Unfortunately, to make cages large enough to cover my raised beds, the wire itself - not to mention lumber to build the supports - would have run me about $200. Es no bueno. Instead, I got something called, ironically enough, "rabbit fence." Hmm... sounds like that should work! I'll give you a picture and then explain what's going on:
I've made some wooden frames and stretched and staples the rabbit fence to them. The bottom board, which fits just inside the bed frame, is a 1x4 cedar plank since it's sitting on bare soil.
The other pieces of wood involved are just furring strips that are 1x3 and 1x2s. I'm using an 18 gauge pneumatic brad stapler to attach everything together. Yes, I know that isn't going to be great in the long term as far as longevity is concerned, but it's working until I can figure out something better. Got a suggestion? Leave a comment.
The biggest problem I'm having so far is figuring out how to connect them to each other. The current solution involves wiring the two together in each corner. I am thinking that I could put an eye screw on the end of each frame and then bolt the two together. If wiring them together starts to not work the best, I'll figure something out...
I should mention that the reason that I'm making these in separate frames is so that I can take them down and store them when needed.
OK, next on the agenda...
While working on the frames today, I noticed some of the plants starting to come up! I was scared that we might have some issues since it was a little frosty this morning, but this is reassuring...
That's the bed closest to the house on the left (henceforth referred to as bed C), with carrots, broccoli, and onions from top to bottom. if you look closely in the middle two rows, you can see itty bitty broccoli plants starting to pop up! Dead center of the picture is a little plastic cup. Why? It's my rain gauge... Since I've had watering issues in the past (under- and over-watering...) I figured I needed a way to tell about how much water is hitting the beds. I have gauges in beds B & C, just to make sure I'm getting fairly even watering.
The bed next to it (bottom right on the original diagram here, henceforth known as bed D) has this in it:
That's a bit more green in the middle as well! Not doing quite as well as the broccoli, but the cauliflower is also coming up! It's also looking like I need to get some of those leaves out, too, as I'm trying to keep out green stuff other than what I planted. I don't like weeds...
The top left bed (bed A) is getting some green in it:
That's some lettuce, and if you look close enough, you can see some spinach coming up!
And finally, bed B:
Mustard greens and spinach, and possibly cabbage. I'm looking at these later and I realize they aren't the greatest photos (I took them quickly this afternoon while packing up my supplies), and can't tell as easily as I could earlier...
I know these are kinda boring pictures, but I think (hope) they'll show a nice progression eventually!
If you look at the calendar at the bottom of the page, you'll notice something somewhat interesting. I went off of the seed packages in putting up the dates, and the only one of these plants that is supposed to be up now is mustard greens. I would include spinach in that, but there isn't a consensus of emergence like there is with the others. Broccoli is a couple days early, and apparently I forgot to put cauliflower in the calendar, but it's the same timeframe as broccoli... Cabbage and Lettuce are also a couple days early, so I'm seeing a bit of a pattern.
OK. I think that's enough for tonight. More updates soon!
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