Not My Normal Tuesday, Either!

This one started out with a stuffy-nosed kid. I'm not sure if he's sick, or if it's all the spraying, fertilizing, and plowing that's going on all around us. What quantity of airborne field dirt and stray ammonia fertilizer can you breathe before you start to sniffle?


This peculiar-looking object is the net our hops vines (Humulus lupulus -- you see the value of a degree in horticulture) climb up. It is made of blue and white garden string, using a wide piece of cardboard as a gauge. It held up extremely well last year, even though the hops vines got very heavy, and the wind scraped it against the edge of the roof all summer and fall.

Then along came my husband, ready to clean up for the winter, and tried to cut it down. For some reason, he did not cut the string I tied it to the roof support with -- he was cutting apart meshes of the net. And it wouldn't fall down. Finally, mostly by accident, he must have cut the tie string, and it slithered to the ground.

I was a little upset. Although it's not a beautiful object like a tatted doily or a lace-knitted bookmark, it was quite a lot of work. I laid it out on the ground, snipped the vines out of the meshes with my Florian ratchet pruners, put it in a lingerie bag, and washed it with the laundry.

The only thing that happened to it was that the garden string overtwisted. You can sort of see the crinkling in this photo.

What I have to do now is stretch it all out and mend where the meshes were cut. This year, when I tie it to the support on the roof (oh: cinder blocks and a couple of lengths of two by four), I am using RED string!