Don't fail me, plant identifier app! 🌱🤞
Hi!
Did you know that cattle panels are an American thing?
I sure didn’t.
I see them all the time online. It’s how people make those gorgeous arched trellises for their backyard gardens.
Just stake some metal posts in the ground, zip tie the panels to them, and you’re all set. Now your vining plants can grow all over them and create a cute path covered in foliage. If you’re growing veggies, you can pick dangling cucumbers or green beans as you walk through.
If you want to get fancy with it, you can slip some string lights through the panel’s wide mesh and create a cozy evening vibe.
That’s the vision I had for my backyard. But it turns out cattle panels aren’t readily available anywhere in Canada. The few places that do have them in stock charge an obscene amount and won’t even deliver them.
And just like that, my dream garden evaporated.
I looked at other ways to do arch trellises, but they either didn’t speak to me or involved way more work and money than I’m willing to put into that right now.
After considering all the options with my husband, we decided to stick with the basics for now.
Just plant the damn veggies in the ground and hope all the leaves, fruit, and flowers end up looking nice enough.
No fancy trellises, just wire cages so the tomatoes don’t droop over. No archways, just narrow grassy paths. No raised beds either, just neatly ordered rectangles of soil.
Kind of a bummer, but the goal is to grow a bunch of food and we can still do that. We can try to add nice little touches as we go and class it up in the coming years - with or without cattle panels.
Our last frost date is coming up, so Mr. Austin spent part of the afternoon in the backyard prepping a space for our first seedlings. He’s doing a method called double digging. It’s something he read about it in a gardening book, and he tends to get overly excited about things he reads in books so he bought a shovel and got to know the earthworms who were hiding a few inches under the grass.
While he dug, I had a close look at everything that’s budding out there.
We bought the house in the winter and just moved in last month, so we have no idea what’s going to bloom in the backyard.
I’m too impatient to just wait and see. So I’ve been using a plant identifier app, Google Image Search, and a bit of gut feeling to figure out what’s back there.
If the app is right, there’s a big red maple and a well-established crab apple tree. There might also be a wine berry bush, though I’m less confident about that one. I’m pretty sure there are some tulips by the fence. And I spotted what I’m almost certain are wild strawberry leaves.
So with any luck, we’ll get to pick some fresh fruit before the winter. Which will almost make up for not having the trellises.
And if not, I’ll delete the app and get a botany book instead.
Love,
Emma ❤
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