A Trellis of Beliefs
Of Life and Limb
By Irene Potter
My spunky friend Betsy has an incredibly bucolic slice of bliss in her little backyard in Palma Ceia. She complains constantly about the damaged wood planks on the deck, about the gunky pond or the lack of grass in the backyard, but I never notice these things. And even when I look closely, I still can’t see these supposed deficits.
All I know is when I’m sitting in one of Betsy’s Adirondack chairs, gazing at the most exquisitely purple water lily, and breathing in the contented sighs from her tomato plants grown in Earth Boxes, a wave of peace engulfs me. Not the kind of feeling you get from hanging around the manicured beauty at “Bloom”, but a contented peace you might call “good vibes.”
Gardeners all seem like such jolly, kind-hearted people, but really, we’re not. We are always contriving ways to recreate something we’ve seen before and will go to all kind of measures to make this come to fruition. Who amongst us has not resorted to tip-toeing through a neighbor’s coleus plants and “ooops,” finding a piece just broke off? Betsy’s incredible success with her Earth Boxes fills me with those underhanded notions.
Sensing my veggie envy, Betsy drove us down to Ellenton to check out the Earth Box store. This is a magical place just off the Ellenton exit from I-75. Turn left and you enter Outlet Mall Nirvana, turn right and you enter the Garden of Eden. This little store is a treasure trove of the best kind of stuff: good, solid, no nonsense advice. And then there’s the vegetable plants… lots of them, in shades of green that just seem to glow.
It’s not too often that you actually get to meet the creator behind the creation, but here in Ellenton, he exists!
Meet Blake Whisenat, whose age depends on the day, but is clearly a bottomless well of information, and best yet, inspiration. His clever invention took years to master and even now, he seeks to improve on this perfection. I figured if Betsy could grow ten tons of cherry tomatoes, French green beans, egg plants, broccoli and peppers in her tiny but sunny backyard, I could at least try. These are foolproof, right?
So we loaded up her mini van, stopped off at the Crab Trap for lunch, and headed back to the big metropolis we call South Tampa. Betsy dropped me off with my newcomer’s kit: a brand spanking new Earth Box, a gigantic bag of potting mix, some accessories and of course, two tomato plants.
Betsy tacked the Earth Box with enthusiastic abandon. There was a flurry of potting mix, water, fertilizer, more potting mix, a little chatter, and voila, my first Earth box was planted! “Now all you need is a trellis” Betsy said, and the joyfulness came to an abrupt halt. “Well, I have some of those old wire cage kinds – will those be OK?”
Betsy looked at me with a demure dismissive expression. “Oh, don’t worry, I have two stakes you can use, and then just figure out a trellis system… it’s easy!”
Always afraid of failure, I rushed inside after hosing myself off after that dirt fling I had just taken part in, and did what everyone else does, I “Googled” it!
There were all kinds of opinions online about what kind of staking system to use, what type of cording to tie between the stakes, and how exactly to tie it. I think I already had the basic idea, how hard could it be to just string some twine in between the poles?
Although I have never woven baskets (at least that I will admit to), I have dabbled in the art of macramé. I weaved grooviness into so many plant hangers during those years – maybe I could do the same for my tomatoes! Armed with lots of natural jute and humming the refrain to “Kum Bye Ya” I began my mystical journey.
However, no matter how tight or how loose I tied those knots around the support poles, all that happened was some geometric curving of the stakes. The more the poles bent inwards, the more of a tomato teepee I was creating. There definitely was a high coolness factor going on with that trellis, but was it strong enough to grow on? Not likely.
On to Plan B. I thought of Betsy’s trellis with its evenly spaced squares and tennis racket precision that she fabricated out of plastic line. Maybe I could model that! So off went the modified macramé plant hanger, and up went the tennis racket. I tied the plastic string horizontally, then vertically, and had about a thousand little knots – this was truly an exercise in excess. How in the world could any plant grow amidst that tangle of string and knots?
I’m quite sure my two little fledgling tomato plants must’ve thought all of this doing and undoing quite amusing, as now for the second time, all the scaffolding came down. How often have each of us constructed a new support network, a new system of beliefs, something that would be solid and steady as our lives grew, only to see our beliefs unravel before our very eyes?
Once again, I resorted to asking my husband Dave for help. “What the heck is with this trellis I keep tying? No matter what, it is not working for me – it’s either too loose or too tight-do you have any ideas?”
“Oh, it’s simple,” Dave said, seemingly unaffected by my sudden and short lived humility. “You need to have strong support at the top, and it won’t matter if you have to re-work the lines from time to time as the plants grow. Right now, you’re pretty much dealing with a lot of instability.”
I had been thinking all along that the problem was with what I was doing in the middle: was I using the right kind of twine, was the pattern conducive to proper growth? What this whole process was missing was something strong and stable at the top to hold this whole operation together.
So handy Dave was out there with his Dremel tool and a piece of old PVC blinds he had kept, and there it was – a reinforced structure. The plants had something to depend on now, and it was entirely up to me as to what to do in the middle. I’d swear that those tomatoes grew two feet overnight; perhaps they felt a renewed sense of purpose – there was now something to grow toward.
So many people spend their lives searching for someone to lean on, to grow old with, to help them reach their full potential. We all need some kind of framework on which to tie our beliefs: we need support during stormy weather, during times of drought, and even during times when we’re full of vigorous growth and grand possibilities.
The trellis you’ve woven may hold you up for a while, but as you continue to grow, you’ll find yourself reaching for something unchanging and unwavering. Now is the time when you must take down all the scaffolding you’ve constructed up to this point – untie the knots, undo the tangles, get back to where you started from. Only then can you know that the source of what holds life itself together must come from above.
My tomatoes have flourished since I got my trellis system figured out, and so will yours. I’d stake my life on it.
Explore posts in the same categories: Davis Islands
