Welp, our little gardening project may have come to an end. Our bean plants became overgrown and top-heavy and finally one day the bamboo “teepee” we setup toppled over. I tried a few times to put it back up but each time the foundation was shaky and it would fall down hours later. I am not sure why, but I suspect either wind or small hungry critters would knock it over.
The root cause was two things. First, the beans had noticeably grown larger than I expected, and the 6-foot tall poles weren’t large enough in the long-run. By the time it toppled over, the beans had grown a length and a half and were hanging down quite a bit. Second, I wanted to do this on a budget (since it was my first vegetable gardening project ever), and so I used very basic bamboo poles. If I had to do it all over again, I would’ve probably uses a proper trellis. Further, I wish I had maybe planted the plans further apart with their own trellises. To be fair, this was all new to me, and I had no idea what to expect, but now realize that the size and space of the garden really matters.
Anyhow, to fix this, we tried to disentagnle the bean plans from the bamboo poles, and trim them back, and redo the teepee better. The result hasn’t been great. The structure is more stable than before, but the plants don’t look healthy since their roots have been damaged from falling over, and their stems were trimmed back quite a bit. One of the plans died almost immediately, but I think I can nurse back one or two plans back to health before winter.
In the meantime, our Butter Crunch Lettuce is growing pretty well:
With the benefit of experience, I’ve been reading on up Butter Crunch Lettuce best-practices (i.e. don’t water too heavily, right spacing, sunlight, etc), so I feel that in the long-run the lettuce will probably fare better than the pole beans did, but here’s hoping. 😌
Gleanings in Buddha-Fields 