Swamp engineering

What you are looking at here is my watermelon and cantaloupe patch.  That is a trellis for them, because when you have a small yard like we do, it's good if vine type things go up rather than out, and melon vines will climb if they have something to climb on.  This knocked out two birds with one stone. 

See, we have a ton of stuff that used to be in our garage, when we had a garage, and among that stuff was the old drop side crib that Erin and Orren slept in when they were babies.  I couldn't bring myself to just unceremoniously trash it.  I also couldn't use it with Chai, even though it wasn't the type of drop-side that had the safety hazard that prompted all the recalls in the first place.  It's old (it was old when I got it, and that was 9 years ago), and it was falling apart.  I hung onto it because I found a tutorial on Pinterest for how to make a drop side crib into a craft table for kids, and I was going to do that with it, but where exactly would I put a craft table in this apartment? 

Then there was the melon issue.  We were going to have to trellis them, and we figured we'd just build a trellis out of the bamboo that grows wild behind our complex.  I had Thak go cut me down some of it, but then I realized it would be SO much easier to use bamboo and the pieces of the crib to make the trellis than making it completely out of bamboo.  We actually have a smaller trellis like this on the other side of the yard, too, using the remaining piece of the crib, in our tomato patch.

That's swamp engineering right there. :)