June 30, 2021:

The next big undertaking was to install trellis. All our trellis material arrived June 30th and leveraged on a local contractor with a post driver mounted on an excavator to drive in all the end and middle row posts. We soon realized that this task was not going to be as easy as we thought it to be.

It took us painstaking hours to mark each post position both along and across the rows in a grid to make sure all the posts were aligned. Once we started driving posts into the gourd there were many places we hit rocks that we had to dig out. In other areas we found that getting two-and-a-half feet to depth for row posts and four three feet of depth for end posts was a challenge because of shale and bedrock not too far beneath the top soil.

In a few places we had to leave the posts a couple of inches taller then the desired six feet. In some other places we had to cut the posts short by as much as six inches. To make sure integrity and strength for some end posts we had to rent another excavator with a jack hammer to break the rock.

Needless to say it took us much longer then we anticipated to install al the posts. With a couple of breaks we finished installing the posts in August – with some left over that we had to manually fix later. Once the posts were finisher the fruiting wire was not much of a challenge to install manually – once we figured out how to prevent it from springing out and unwinding out of control.

A few Gripple anchors with four foot long cables have been another challenge to completely submerge into the ground and we have had to adjust the way we connected cables to secure end posts to anchors.

Although it has taken a bit of ingenuity and reengineering, we have been able to completely install the trellis system such that is fully secured and visually well aligned both along and across the rows.