This week involved some much-needed structure. And by that, I mean putting together something for my hops to climb.
For some time, they’ve been climbing bamboo canes without anywhere to go once they reach the top. Fortunately, they’ve only grown just over a foot and have another three feet or so of bamboo before they run out of room. So it was hardly an urgent race against time.
I ordered an obelisk online, having previously never even been aware of the word. Essentially, it’s a four-sided, free-standing trellis thing. I thought it would arrive fully formed, but it turned out to be
in pieces and with limited instructions.
Previously, the extent of my assembly skills was largely limited to a Meccano set I got for Christmas when I was about 11. I made things for a few months, before packing everything away to gather dust forevermore.
Assembling the obelisk was not without its complications, by which I mean that it kept falling. But after about two hours and a lot of swearing under my breath, it was finished and stands at about 1.8 metres. And it is still standing to this day, albeit four days later.
I’m now trying and encourage some of the hops to climb onto the obelisk. The plan is to use this as a base and then build and a taller network of bamboo canes and twine, possibly even branching out using actual branches of the nearby sycamore tree.
In other news, gigs are running again but I’m not actively pursuing them at the moment. I need to get a steady run of them together to avoid the stop-start situation that always ends up being frustrating. And that won’t be for a while. But by the time I am doing gigs again, my hops will be a lot taller and may even be ready to harvest.