The paint's faded, but the string and poles have held up well

First go out and buy some string (butcher’s string works well) and some of those 4-ft long bamboo poles. You can get them from the hardware store.

25 in a package

For this project, you’ll need eleven of them. So you can make two a-frames per pack! Not bad… Take two of your bamboo stakes and a piece of string 12″-18″ long.

Make three of these.  Place them next to each other in your garden, about 1.5′ apart.  You should have used six stakes. Take the seventh stake and place it on top – use this to line up your stakes properly. Tie it on.

The top bar, going across

Now take your eighth and ninth stakes, and tie them going across, about 1.5′-2′ up from the ground.  The stake getting tied to the vertical supports goes on the inside of the frame, the stake getting tied to the diagonal supports goes on the outside of the frame.

Tie them to all three vertical supports, and all three diagonal supports.

a-like so!

Now take your final two stakes and break them in half.  You’ll only use three of the halves for this frame, but save the other one in case you want to make another frame later.  Tie them going across your horizontal supports, at each intersection.

You don't have to get as crazy with the string here, these stay in place pretty well

Once you’ve tied all three, your frame should be finished!

Finished A-Frame

Simple, effective, easy, and cheap.

COST: $4 for the package of 25 4′ bamboo poles, +$5 for a package of string (if you don’t have it already)

= $9 total, makes TWO A-Frames. $4.50/frame

TIME INVESTMENT: 30 minutes

We grow a variety of vegetables on ours – cucumbers, beans, green beans, peas…they hold up remarkably well.  One of ours began to lean a bit under the weight of all of our cucumbers, but it never fell apart and it never fell over.  We plant one seedling at each base of the stake – so it should hold six plants.

Cucumber Seedling

Happy planting! =)

In the meanwhile, our suburban sustainability has begun to really pay off.

We get fresh quail eggs every day.

Fry them in a pan with a little bit of season salt...and they make amazing appetizers!

My fiance’s jalapeno plant is growing more peppers than I though possible for such a small bit of greenery.  We’re contemplating how to use them all.  Ideas?

He likes to surreptitiously slip these into stir fry.

This was our first zucchini.  We’ve got a couple more that are almost ready, and more that will be ready in the next weeks.  We chopped it up, fried it, seasoned it with soy paste, and it was DELICIOUS!  Best zucchini I’ve ever had.

And our thirteen tomato plants are all growing a ton of tomatoes.  I can tell we’ll be making a lot of gazpacho, tomato sauce, salads, and salsa.

These are the "Extreme Bush" variety. So far I'd recommend - very hardy, lots and lots of tomatoes, minimal staking required. Let's see how they taste!

Here’s what our garden looks like now.

Mostly tomatoes on the right, eggplants, sunflowers, squashes, and cucumbers on the left.

VEGGIE GARDEN’S DAILY TIME INVESTMENT: 2-3 minutes.  We’ve set up an automatic sprinkling system with different sprinkler heads for the different plants.  I just go out there to do some sporadic weeding, fertilize once every week or two, and to check what veggies are ready for picking.  Easier than going to the grocery store.

In other news, my mom gave me a few hanging flower baskets.  They look lovely.  I water them twice a day.  A couple of times while watering them, a little finch flew out of one of the baskets.  “How strange,” I thought.  The third time it happened, I knew it couldn’t be a coincidence.  I brought a chair over, and peered inside.

The bird had built a nest in there!  Here I was, unknowingly watering her eggs.  From that point on, I watered really carefully around the nest.

Yesterday morning, they hatched.

The lovely basket my mom gave to me.

And inside…

Tired babies!

Be back soon!