Jetting in a Trellis

It's a 3 day weekend and one of the few weekends we've had lately without a full schedule. I've had time today to play outside. I got some spraying done this morning. Roundup to kill weeds everywhere I don't want weeds. I sprayed a mix of pytherin insecticide and daconil fungicide on just about everything this morning to keep fungus and insects from getting all my tree fruits and grapes. I sprayed some of my fruits with imadicloprid, remember that stuff?

I did some minor plumbing this afternoon and added a hose faucet to the irrigation pipe near the strawberries. This will let me hook up a hose at the far end of all my plantings to water a patch of watermelons I put in next to the strawberries.

The cucumbers plants I transplanted to the garden a couple of days ago need a trellis. Cucumbers vines cover a lot of ground. I don't have that much area in my garden. Last year, I tried to grow the cucumbers on a trellis and in tomato cages but I put up the trellis and cages after the vines were already out of control and it didn't work very well. This year I'm starting with the trellis earlier. The trellis is a couple of posts stuck in the ground and I'm going to tie some string between them to give the vines something to climb. Driving the posts in the ground is always work. Not liking work, I came up with another garden innovation.

One method of driving pilings into the ground when doing construction of piers and marinas is to use a jet of water to bore a hole in the sand as you drive the piling. If it works for them, it should work for me. My home built jet is nothing more than a piece of 1/2" plastic pipe and a fitting on one end to attach to a garden hose.

using a water jet to drive a post

with the water on, I was able to easily push the jet pipe nearly 3' into the ground in under a minute. Dirt ahead of the water jet washed up, around the pipe to the surface. Once I had the hole, I started to work the post into the hole using the jet pipe to clear a bigger hole. With almost no work at all, I was able to "Drive" two posts two feet deep in under 5 minutes. Another garden innovation brought to you by GardenerX.

the water jet in action

And finally, my strawberries are starting to get ripe. We've had a strawberry or two every day for a week but today was the first day there was enough to do something with. We probably picked two quarts of strawberries today and there are many, many more to ripen over the couple of weeks. A lot of the ripe ones were a little fuzzy or had soft spots. We've had a lot of rain lately and fruit sitting in water gets fungus but there were still a lot of good ones. I'm planning on having strawberry shortcake tonight with dinner.

the first strawberries of the season