**Hammer drill was required**
My co-habitator has required this to be added to his tool box if this projects makes it back on the Honey-Do list. Actually he still wants it regardless of the Honey-Do list. We're still negotiating on its necessity.
At any rate, this project was all his idea. I had some serious doubts about it working, what it would look like, and what to plant so I did a lot of nodding and smiling. But now I think it's pretty cool and we need to add to it.
We have a cement wall in the back yard between the house and the train tracks. It gray, it's boring, and it's the whole length of the back yard. I'm more a fan of color and greenery myself so it was suggested that a tension cable could be strung at the top of each section and we could hang things off of it. I was thinking hanging baskets and my skepticism was born.
The first tension cable went up! About that time we had a friend over and he reached up to grab it (testing the strength and manliness of the project I presume) and it practically fell apart in his hands. Skepticism ignited. Friend said 'I don't think this will hold much' and I'd have to agree with him. So the cables were re-thought and redone. We were fortunate enough to borrow a friends hammer drill and it expedited the snails pace of this project to something like a tortoise running for its life. But it got done and we cut up a section of wire fencing and connected it to the tension cable ends with zip-ties. The idea is to grow vines like honesuckle, trumpet, and clematis against the pillars and hang pockets between that can grow other things. I had a honeysuckle in a pot out front for a short time and we opted to transplant it in the heat of summer. It has since started to show its greenery spring of 2020!
For Christmas my co-habitator (who had since proposed and we shall now refer to him as fiancé) got me some really fun things for the garden. One of which was a single section of the green hanging pockets. We've since bought a few more to try different styles, colors, and price points. I was originally thinking flowers in the pockets, but since I have onion starts that the German Shephard has helped himself to in pots, I've opted to plant all the herbs in the hanging wall pockets to give them a better shot at surviving more than 3 hours. I've also opted to try some remaining onion starts in the hanging pockets as well. We have quite a few varieties of basil and various other chives and herbs to plant once it gets warm enough. We will see how this year goes with the 4 squares of pockets and acquire more as desired/needed.
We currently don't have a sprinkler system on a timer in the backyard. We do however have two orchard sprinklers that I manually turn on individually because they don't have enough pressure to run simultaneously. I currently use a third hose with a sprayer on the end to water my two columns of onion starts each morning. We've talked about a soaker hose at the top of the pouches, but I think we would go through a long soaking before the water gets to the bottom of the pouches. But the idea is that the top row of pouches would get enough water and would drip through the felt pouch to the one below and so on and so forth. Seems time consuming when I can just turn the sprayer on for 10 seconds and the onions have had a thourough soaking. So this still needs some thought. I think we still need to figure out the layout of the whole back yard and that will help determine the layout of sprinklers. In the mean time, hand watering shall continue!