Before and After Kansas City: Stake Cover!

So, before I get into the meat of this post, I want to acknowledge a very cool fact. This weekend is our garden's first birthday! Last year Chris traveled with some friends for a Memorial Day weekend mancation. The previous weekend we'd gotten the lumber in the ground for our garden beds, so this weekend last year I did our planting. It's amazing to think that was only a year ago. We've already been enjoying the fruits and veggies in our garden, and this time last year I was just getting our beds filled with dirt and planted. So amazing!

So, last year we had few strawberries, but the plants just kept reaching out and sprouting. This spring we've been absolutely LOVING the berries. They're incredible. They taste so different than a grocery store berry. They're red all the way through, and drip juice down your chin when you take a bite!

So, the other day when I went out into the garden, I saw a very tragic sight. All around the garden bed were half eaten, rotting berries. I've heard about birds bothering berries and figured this was the case.

This is especially insulting considering I keep the birds (and unfortunately the squirrels too) very well fed and watered on the other side of the yard! The nerve!

So, in emergency mode, I went to our local nursery today and looked at what I could do. Here's the gear I ended up with. What's great is, I only had to purchase the net, which was $4.99. We had everything else.

I drilled holes in our old landscaping stakes, which we originally purchased to lay out the garden area last spring.

I ran old gardening stakes through the holes, then cut the stakes to length.

Finally, I stretched the nylon mesh over the stakes and tucked them in with more old gardening stakes.

While this isn't the fanciest arrangement, it cost only $5 and will keep the birds out for now. I'm devising in my head a structure Chris can be kind enough to build me for the long term, with screens and hinges. For now though, I think this will work.

While at the nursery, I also grabbed some stakes and ties for my tomato plants, which have really begun to grown with all the rain in the last week. Last year I used tomato cages to contain the plants, and felt like they interfered with the branches as the plants grew. So this year I've been looking forward to trying using stakes and ties to keep them upright.

The ties are really cool. They're a nylon-coated wire, like a very soft twist tie, that won't cut into the stems of the plants and that I can easily move as the plants grow.