Friday, November 7, 2008

MacGyvering Gone Wrong

When my aunt came to visit last weekend she looked at the peas just starting to poke through the soil and told me I needed to "cage them in." Ah yes, she was speaking of the trellis thingamabob that I've never needed because nothing has ever grown high enough to need one before…unless you count my tomatoes that she recently scalped, but they're in tomato cages. I went to Home Depot with the boys this week. They don't sell pea cages.

My aunt said that since these peas only grow about 2 feet tall that I can make a dome over them with chicken wire or just create a tent over them with sticks from the yard and they'll do just fine. She said they'll be sort of low and bushy, but they'll be off the ground so should be happy enough. She made me feel guilty when she said that their new little tendrils are clearly looking for something to climb and I must make something ASAP.

The problem with this is twofold. I don't really make things for the outside. I'm more of an inside kind of girl when it comes to making things. And Farmer B has been away for training so I've had to stare at these baby peas getting bigger and bigger with nothing to climb on and no man around to build them anything.

So I took the idea of a dome in my head… I rummaged around the shed and found some of the fencing that we used to put around the garden. I used Farmer B's wire cutters (that I've never seen him take outside) and yanked and pulled until I cut a piece off the mega-roll of fencing.

I poked it in the ground just over the peas and then realized that the peas in the middle probably couldn't reach it. I had pea guilt again.

So I had the boys go around the yard collecting sticks for me. I then poked the sticks all around the peas and between the new fenced dome so they'd have something to climb up.
Oh it looks trashy. And not very stable. And trashy. And the reason it's not a real MacGyver job is because when he threw random stuff together it actually worked. This… I'm not too sure about.
The best part will be when Farmer B comes home and goes out into the garden tomorrow to see how things are doing. He'll take one look at the mess over the peas and give me the whole "What the heck happened here?" speech. I've already got an answer.
The boys did it. Isn't it cute? Don't ask them about it though. They'll deny everything. It's supposed to be a surprise.

If that's wrong, I don't wanna be right.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's funny....ha! What kind of peas are those? Sugar snap snow peas? If so, you'll need something much taller. My snowpeas have already climbed 6 ft.

Kate and Crew said...

EG - they are "Alaska (Wilt Resistant) Peas" according to the package. On the back it says "with vines 2 1/2 feet tall" but nothing has grown to the full height on any seed packaging yet - LOL. I hope that my ugly cage works. I suppose we can build something bigger over it. It's a mad mess huh?

Anonymous said...

It's a very interesting cage, for sure! lol. Oh well, it'll work...afterall, the boys did it when you weren't looking - right?

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