Just a few photos this weekend.

[rebeccmeister]

Storm rolls in. One thing my desk has going for it is a phenomenal window for gazing out of when I am trying to think. It has been especially interesting to watch summer thunderstorms roll in.	Put a Bird On It. Usually there are just pigeons on the ledge, doing their rock-dove thing and pooping. Yesterday, there were swallows!
Begging.	Raising Tomatoes. Kind of like a barn raising, except a whole lot smaller, no walls or roof, and nobody other than myself.
Re-caged. Much, much better. The tomato plants are no longer growing through the bird netting, and I can now actually reach in easily to pluck the tomatoes before they rot.

The tomato cage was constructed out of pallet wood. I was originally planning on building gardening containers out of it, when I wasn't sure about whether I would continue living in this house for another year. The nice thing about pallet wood is that it's free! All it costs is the time required to prep the boards and put them back together again.

Comments

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

I've been making tomato cages out of roughly 3"x4" hardware cloth -- the fairly heavy steel rectilinear stuff you can buy that's between chicken wire and chainlink fence. You can cut it into meter-and-a-half lengths, cut off one lateral wire (leaving you a whole bunch of legs sticking out the bottom) and then circle it around a tomato and stick the legs in the ground.

I like the pallet as raised bed: that's a neat recycling.

[rebeccmeister.livejournal.com]

That stuff is great! The tomatoes at hand are a group of six plants, and I didn't manage to get them caged in any fashion at all until rather late in the game. I'll keep the alternate caging method in mind for next time!

Turning pallets into raised beds or containers is great! There's just one factor to take into consideration - one must make sure the wood hasn't been pressure-treated with toxic preservatives (arsenic, I think?). Usually such wood is obvious because it acquires a greenish tinge. The thing I really like about using pallet wood is that wood used in gardening winds up rotting away eventually. So it's nice to use wood that's not too valuable for that sort of activity.