Frame for Homegrown Beans

In case any of you were wondering, I am in fact still alive. It's just being a busy few months in real life, so what projects I do have time for, I haven't been finding the time to write up. I have kind of painted myself into a corner as to the level of effort my blog posts have been taking, so I'm thinking I need to start scaling back how much work each post on here takes. I figure some mediocre content on here is probably going to be more entertaining for you than no content at all. 

Ever since my parents found themselves without children or dogs in the house, they have been slowly removing the no longer needed lawn around our property and converting it into productive vegetable garden. This means that my spring break in Sunnyvale is usually spent helping with the manual labor to prep most of a suburban backyard (and ever increasingly more of our front yard) for another season.

This year, we decided that one of the new things we'd try is a more robust framework for our beans to grown on than our usual improvised trellis of sticks. A trip to the hardware store and a few hours of work this morning resulted in the pictured assembly. An A frame built from 2x4s, with some stove bolts and beam mounting hardware for two 10' cross beams at ground and head height, connected to one of the fence's 4x4s. The A frame rests on a pair of buried cinder blocks, and we designed the entire framework such that, at the end of the year, we can loosen a few nuts and the entire thing disassembles for storage while we retill the soil for next season.

All that's left at this point is mounting the wire mesh between the top and bottom beams for the beans to climb on, and planting the beans next week.  And this is really how I spend my spring breaks, in case any of you didn't think I was weird enough as it was. Whoo! Spring break!

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