Garlic Planted in Styrofoam Containers and Bamboo Trellises

Bamboo trellises planted with pole green beans, cucumber, pole dry beans, luffa, and bitter melon.

The garden is huge. I didn't realize how much my husband had expanded the garden until I started putting up the trellises. It was actually my husband's idea to put the trellises alongside our neighbors garage. The neighbor tends to have lots and lots of outdoor parties where they sit outside and watch sports on t.v., and this will shield our backyard from view so I can garden in relative privacy.

And that's an alley running along our backyard perpendicular to the bamboo trellises. Okra will be planted along the alley side, which will shield the tomato beds from passersby. It looks like I'll have ten long beds, each about 4 feet wide available for planting.

Garlic. I had planted 4 styrofoam containers with different varieties of garlic. Two were planted with unknown grocery store garlic and the other two were planted with garlic I had purchased from a seed company. All of the unknown grocery store garlic died during the winter, only one thin waif-like stalk remains of those doomed garlic.

But as you can see the 2 varieties of fancy garlic I purchased online are doing ok in their separate styrofoam containers.

Bamboo Ridge Trellis for Cucumbers and Pole Beans

I finally finished trellising the 25-30 foot row of pole beans on Thursday, the 25th. It only took a week of lacing brown string between top and bottom bamboo poles and untangling pole bean vines. The yard-long asparagus beans were knee high when I began but by the end of the week they're reaching the almost 6 feet tall posts. They must be loving the heat and humidity.

The other pole beans were so much longer and took forever to untangle. Hours upon hours. Heat upon heat.

In comparison this side of the trellis (which I actually did first) containing melons, cucumbers, loofa, and bitter melon was so much easier to trellis. It only took 2-3 days which included setting up the bamboo structure, zip tying netting to the bamboo posts, detangling vines and trying to get tendrils to attach to the netting.

All in all it took a week and a half of work in ninety-some degree weather. Our yard backs up to a shared alley, so there were lots of witnesses to me sweating up a storm mostly neighbors and passersby. Even a work crew with a big machine scraping weeds growing in the alley and the men later laying down new gravel. Ah well. Life goes on.