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A Gardening Blog

Wednesday, May 7th, 2008

Posted by Craig Sailor @ 08:00:00 am

Out at the Willapa garden last weekend I worked on our wind-damaged greenhouse a bit and then decided to build my mom a bean pole frame.

The one she's been using for years was super flimsy and would fall over once the beans got too big.

The top of a cedar tree blew out in the Dec. 1 storm, landing squarely on a fence surrounding some pear trees. After replacing the fence and bucking up the top I set aside some limbs. That's what we do at Willapa: never let good cedar go to waste. For generations my family has been using cedar limbs and saplings to mark our oyster land. All wood rots eventually but cedar lasts longer than most.

Cedar is such an amazing wood. First peoples used them (and still do) for canoes, clothing, housing, masks, chests and hundreds of other purposes.

These limbs were very curving as they are want to be so I made two tripods and then inserted an extra long one across the two tripods. It's all secured with super strong twine. Mom will plant pole beans at the base of each leg and let them twine up and across the horizontal pole.

I'll let you know whether this one falls over or not.

Categories: Organic gardening, Vegetables • 1 comment

COMMENTS:

Comment by Pivomike @ 11:24 - Thursday, May 8th, 2008

Yes, all power to cedar.
The only thing you forgot to say was how good it smells as kindling, and in other forms.

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Get Growing

Craig Sailor is the Arts & Entertainment editor at The News Tribune. Last year he planted his first vegetable garden. Focusing on unusual varieties, “Freak of Nature” returns for 2008 with a new crop of uncommon vegetables and flowers. This year he’ll try yin yang beans, giant pumpkins, blue poppies and mutant sunflowers. He gardens at his North End Tacoma home and sneaks seeds in to his mother’s garden at Willapa Bay when she’s not looking. .

Sue Kidd is the Lifestyle Editor at The News Tribune. She is a devoted vegetable gardener, but otherwise a tragic mess at growing just about anything else. Her current obsessions are growing tomatoes on a trellis and trying to convince all her South Hill neighbors to ditch the chemicals and go green in the garden (they are very suspicious of her). She’ll blog about garden gadgets, the latest garden trends and her current garden disasters. She is also the ringleader for the Home&Garden section, so e-mail her with thoughts/rants/questions/bizarre observations. sue.kidd@thenewstribune.com. Use it.

Contact us at Sue.Kidd@thenewstribune.com Craig.Sailor@thenewstribune.com

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