The weekly MP Garden Update

I know you've got to be getting tired of the endless garden posts, but we did a little work on the garden this weekend and wanted to share.  Back when we built our Earthtainers, the piece we had trouble finding was pea fencing (Do a Google Image search if you'd like to see what we're missing) to support our growing tomatoes.  At the time, we thought we could re-use the two tomato cages left over from last summer's failed attempt at tomato-growing.  For a while, the tomato cages worked well.  And then Rutgers and the Big Boy got HUGE! 

The first major summer storm we had knocked them right over--a problem we fixed by wiring the cages to the deck railing.  This worked for a while longer, but the plants kept growing and became too top-heavy.  The storm we had last week proved to be too much for both plants and their sad little wired cages. 

Rutgers, being the smaller of the two plants, is now staked with an old piece of wood that seems to be holding.  Because of the way the Earthtainers are constructed, we couldn't drive a stake far enough into the soil to support Big Boy (seriously, he's taller than me).  Instead, we used two old boards leftover from our old fence.  We slid the first in between the deck railing and the Earthtainer and nailed it to the railing.  Then, we placed the second directly across the Earthtainer from the first and stood Big Boy up between the two boards.  We ran wire around the entire thing in a few places to hold everything in place.

So far (even with a storm the last two nights) everything is holding.  Here is a picture so you can see how awful it looks!  (Function definitely wins out over form on this one!)

Next year, we're buying the pea fence online.