#bean support

[huariqueje]

Bean Support - Philine van der Vegte , 2023.

Dutch , b. 1980s

Oil on wood panel , 30 x 22 cm.

[balkanradfem]

So lot of the people in the community garden have installed store-bought, sturdy trellises for their beans and cucumbers to climb on; they look fancy and the plants look so pretty climbing onto that.

I only have my riverside-found sticks for plants to climb onto, and often I can tell the plants are wanting more space and trying to steal each others sticks, because they want to grow and climb more. So, I had an idea. Since I have a row of sticks, I bought to the garden with me a long string. I had it for years and never used it for anything but building faux-forts in my room.

So, I tied up the sticks to each other. Then I tied them up a few more times on different heights, and added vertical string, tangling it with each horizontal line, until I had a little diy trellis going on!

Is that not kinda cool? You can see the beans starting to climb on the sticks, now they need to figure out they can also climb on the string, and they, in theory, should be able to create a green wall in the garden, which would be very cool for me to see.

I had another bed of beans, and I wanted a different strategy for those; I made a net on top of all the sticks, imitating a net-roof kind of situation. Because I thought it would be cool if they grew as a natural shade and created a nice area protected from the sun, so they're having an easier time in the hot summer. It's not very big but here it is:

Now if the beans get the hint and do exactly what I want, I would find that very cool and beautiful, it would also hide all of these sticks and make my garden into a green, well-managed heaven to be in.