Beating the Frost and an Update on the Bike Trailer, or Plastic Derangement Syndrome in Two Acts

It got cold all of a sudden! Oh Shit! The peppers seem unbothered though.

In fact they seem happier than they've been in months. Full of flowers!

Aluminum hoops are up on one bed, I feel like I should pull that zucchini but its still producing... Anyway, want to venture a guess where the aluminum came from? I know a couple PVC pipes would do the job neatly but I just cannot bring myself to willingly put PVC into my garden, let alone buy it for the purpose!

The peas agree, if you were wondering.

Now my other beds need row covers too, and I only had so much aluminum. I will be re-purposing these awful galvanized tomato cages for the job. Hate these things but they are not plastic at least.

Split them down one side with the bolt cutters and you've got a great sturdy hoop.

I don't want to disturb the last of the black spanish radish.

So the rows will go either side of them. I'll put the plastic over once i've picked these radishes in a few days.

"BUT!", you might say, "I thought you were avoiding plastic at all costs!" and you'd be right. But my small hoard of glass is certainly not enough to convert my beds to cold frames, at least not yet, so re-used clear plastic packaging film is a compromise I'm willing to make. At least I'm keeping it put of the landfill for now.

I've made a second exception for these sturdy plastic water bottles as well. My kid is very particular about water and I forfeited the battle on water in plastic bottles (preposterous, I protested) for a tactical advantage in the war of getting-my-kid-to-drink-water. Parenting is funny huh. They'll live in one of my enclosed beds full of dark-colored water as an experiment in heat retention. how fun!

A couple pieces of scrap oak trim sacrificed themselves as couplers for shorter pieces of wire to form the hoops for the other end of the bed. Back in the scouts with our green Eureka! A-frame tents we used to call these "flutes". 

I'll run a ridgepole under the plastic made from tree pruning byproduct sticks to keep the plastic taught under rain and maybe even light snow load.

Little white turnips are looking pretty good!

Anyway, on to the bike trailer which, you may have guessed, is the source of those aluminum hoops! I had an inexplicable preoccupation with keeping the nylon cover and kid seats intact on this thing, convinced I would one day pass it on to a parent with small kids. But, in honesty, the nylon was cooked, everything looked awful, and it was getting in the way of it functioning as a cargo trailer. So I took a deep breath, muttered a nembutsu, and let it go. The nylon (damn plastic) to the trash, the aluminum to the garden, and the trailer base at its basic on to hauling stuff! The wood slats however, never really worked. They split and slid around and just kinda sucked. An idea was born however, another one to divert some plastic, I would use some busted tires off my commuter bike as webbing. Dumb right? Well, here we go.
 

The stripped down trailer ready to accept its new webbing.

Two rivets is surely enough, right?

The circular tires really didnt want to become flat webbing, but that kind of reasonable consideration means nothing to a head quite as thick and hard as mine.

Two bands on with a few more to go, but time is up for this workshop session. I'll have to finish up next time. 

Gassho