Building the cable trellis...

Installing the trellis. That's Ben in the picture! Look at how tiny he is!

This past weekend was round one of installing the cables for the trellis! My older brother Ben came down to lend a VERY helpful hand! We had a lot of fun, tried some crazy stuff to get up to the tops of the 18' posts. Let's go for a ride and check it out.

This is the design I came up with...It's a V-trellis for double the production.

This is what it will look like from the ground.

To start off, my plan was to build a trailer for my tractor that would have a scaffold platform on it. The problem was, it would have taken half the day to build and Ben wanted to get cables up in the air. We decided that each of us would lug around a 32' extension ladder that happened to be on Ben's truck when he showed up. Lucky us!

That's me!

Let me put that into prospective, each one of those ladders weighs in at 72 pounds. I'm tired of carrying heavy things! And of course to top that off, our hop yard is on a hill. So, I guess what I am trying to say is, by noon, Ben and I had enough of the ladders.

We put our thinking caps on and came up with a solution. Use one of our hay wagons with the ladder in it. Let the tractor do the work! Oh and of course when the more dangerous stuff started happening, Crystal's father Bob showed up to help!

Don't worry OSHA, nobody is getting paid on this job!

 Working with the 1x7 5/16" EHS cable was a real treat. The stuff is tough as hell! It ended up taking longer than anticipated to hurdle some of the learning curves, so we ended up only getting the mains strung by the end of the day. Oh well, there is always next weekend.