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Friday, October 30, 2009

Bamboo garden fence

Hello all! I have not forgotten about blogging, but it seems life has consumed all of my spare moments. Work has increased its frenzy because I am having surgery in a few days and I have gone into hyperdrive trying to order everything. My hope is that if I order everything that I can think of and leave many lesson plans, my assistant can follow instructions that I have left and compliment those instructions with what she has already done previously to keep everything going while I am away. I am blogging today about an activity that was completed lately... it was the bamboo fence around my wildflower garden.

This activity started because my wildflower garden got mowed over in the corners by a few of the Grounds Maintainance workers a couple of times because they thought it was "weeds"!

HURUMPF...but, in their defense, my wildflowers look pretty raggedy by the beginning of September. So, I wanted a fence around the garden to define my wildflower gardens to other people besides myself. Of course, the project took on a life of its own as soon as I suggested the idea to the crew.


First, we went 4 wheeling on the front hill of the Medical Center to get to the bamboo grove which a wonderful excuse to lock the hubs on the FORD 250. There were 3 excursions...maybe even 4 excursions to the Grove. We used small pruning saws and would cut the canes on an angle as low to the ground as I could get. The canes were brought back to the greenhouse with all the leaves on them.

Once the canes were back at the greenhouse, all of the small branches were cut off and saved in a large bin to weave in throught the fence poles to leave smooth canes to work with for fencing ples. Then the canes were cut into posts about 24-36 inches long.
As you can see from the following pictures, one of my crew dug "post holes" with a bulb planter, then we put the canes cut to the same length in the post hole, and backfilled the hole with dirt.

I wove a thinner piece of bamboo at the top and another at the bottom using opposite weaves to maximum strength with opposing frictional pull. The middle was woven with the tops of the canes. This picture is looking down on the fence. A big shaggy fence. Here are some pictures of the end result after a month...not bad!

Now lets see how this does after the snow!
Happy Gardening!!







2 comments:

  1. In Puerto Rico weed whackers squads, will obliterate ANYTHING, that is most of the vegetation in any context, since
    they are illiterate, and can only recognize perhaps 15 of the over used
    common place ornamentals here.

    In your situation the excuse, 'we thought they were weeds' is rather lame. They WERE weeds/wild plants or not?

    That is a big problem, even though
    particular situations as yours may
    be solved with a fence, in most contexts, IGNORANCE, is the culprit.

    In a court of law, ignorance is no excuse. Nice blog.. Until next.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you. I am but a humble gardener.

    ReplyDelete