Category: Tools

Pie plate protection

2 Jul 202627 Jun 2026 by Mike (tfb)

A couple of pie plates tied to a post, fluttering and lightly clanking in the breeze…scares birds. Why mess with the birds? In this case, to protect green beans as they emerge as perfectly peckable bird treats. To prevent avian decapitation, pie plates work, more DIY than scare balls, with the added dimension of sound. Not as soothing as wind chimes, but relaxing in the background, probably because it signals…protection!

DETAILS: It’s amazing what wind can do. In really heavy gusts, the plates can tear off—there’s a rip from last year on the upper pan. But that’s an extreme. You could reinforce the hole, but I don’t bother. For the post, which can also get blown over, I dug a small hole with a trowel, filled it with water, then pounded it into the mud. Probably a foot down. The whole rig should hang together just fine.

Melons in training

26 Jun 202625 Jun 2026 by Mike (tfb)

Melons have been out from under row cover for a couple days now, and seem fine. They look a little more vibrantly green in the photo than they do to me. It’s been weeks now of more cloud than sun, and none of the crops have the deep green, raring to grow look so far. But hot sunny days are forecast. I moved the vines to lean on the twine so they can head up. The tendrils haven’t figured it out yet. Those little yellow spots on the one leaf at the bottom left are maybe some sort of bacterial attack. Being out in open with good fresh air circulation will hopefully keep that from spreading. I’ll remove the leaf if it gets worse.

Since I don’t use pesticides, other than occasional plant soap spray, it’s really up to the plants to do their thing. The row cover as cucumber beetle protection worked, although using heavier cover made it more humid under there, perhaps promoting the bacterial spots. Giving them something to climb improves air and keeps them off wet ground. I try to be helpful, without getting in the way! :)

Basic tomato cage

25 Jun 202624 Jun 2026 by Mike (tfb)

Ran into these cheapest of tomato cages in town, two bucks a pop, so I picked up a few. They’ve been around unchanged since I started growing veg over a couple of decades ago: three hoops flimsily spot welded to three support legs. Can’t speak for every last use, but from first-hand field tests, they’re pretty useless—a nice, neat-looking gesture to being in control when the toms are tiny, but prone to sag or tilt or snap at the joints under the weight of grown plants. Not great for a home veg garden, and really not for any sort of tiny production quantities. So why bother now? Well, one can always hope and dream. Since these toms went in late, given our short season, and the small number of plants, I can imagine carefully tending them—suckering enough to keep them productively compact, harvesting regularly before they get heavy. Plus, they take literally 30 seconds to place, and, at first at least, they look kinda cool and organized. Like a Jetsons garden. We’ll see how it goes!

Layers of protection

23 Jun 202622 Jun 2026 by Mike (tfb)

Layered protection for beds of cabbage and cauliflower. First, row cover for the flea beetles, who are out in force as usual. Loosely laid on top, deer netting, that doesn’t actually work for deer (it didn’t for the deer around here) but will hopefully deter the groundhogs. The net could easily be chewed through, but it’s springy, tensile tough and very easy to get tangled in. That may be enough!

On the right side of the fence

10 Jun 202610 Jun 2026 by Mike (tfb)

Wonder who spent the night here in the tall grass, so close to all those veggies. At least they stayed on the right side of the fence! It’s endlessly satisfying how that single white line and its steady pulse of intense electrical jolts have managed to keep the veg plot clear of deer. I can’t say for sure that’s what’s doing it, but deer are definitely all around, traveling through these fields, and they were a big garden forager before and during various lighter-weight fencing attempts. They only completely stopped devouring after that single line of defense went up. No electric fence guides I’ve read suggest just a single line, and yet, the plot’s been deer-free for years now. Can’t say the same for groundhogs, that extension of the electrical defense was a fair bit of work and a fail. But, still no deer!

Looking for leaks

10 Jun 20267 Jun 2026 by Mike (tfb)

Drip tape is a really fantastic way to irrigate: low-pressure, drop by drop, straight into the ground leaves no room for being blown off target or evaporated by a hot sun. Slow and steady. Peaceful. For years now, I’ve been set up with the tape and fittings to fully drip-ify an acre or two. And it’s really not expensive. Yet somehow, it’s never gone all the way. Whose loss, if anyone’s, I wonder. Instead, the crops have gotten by with natural rain, and in desperately dry times, it’s been dragging around hoses to water by hand, or deploy the water-wasting but quick and easy sprinklers. I have used drip for melons, because they really don’t seem to grow well without the extra ground heat of black plastic mulch, and drip tape underneath waterproof plastic is a perfect pairing. Still, haven’t always used it even there. This year, for the tiniest melon row, it’s drip tape deluxe. Eliminate leaks, then turn the water valves to low!

Pot experiment update #1

2 Jun 20261 Jun 2026 by Mike (tfb)

Tomato seedlings: plug sheet vs deep pot

The story so far: Five days ago, 10 tomato seedlings, five each of two varieties, were potted up from the plugsheet where they started, to individual deep pots. The pots measure twice as deep as the cells, though they look taller in the photo. Pretty soon, all the toms will be transplanted at the same time, side by side, to see if deeper rooting leads to bigger, better, faster tomato plants. The ones in pots were also buried up to their seed leaves (that first pair that look like wings)—with their power of adventitious rooting, new roots will develop along the buried stem, so there’ll be a LOT more roots. The leafy parts look about the same between the two, while the real action right now is happening underground. In the plugsheet, roots are already circling around the cell walls. In the pots, it’s a root jailbreak, although they’ll find their new walls pretty quick. But walls that won’t be there forever!