So, far, the garden is not worth reading about. We walked down there last night to check on the tomato worm situation. Last week, we pulled off about a dozen worms before they had a chance to do much damage. Not seeing any new poop yet, so hopefully we have won round one. That's about the only good news. The ground has been almost incessantly wet ever since I planted it. Half of the butterbeans never came up, and I have not had time to plant the skips, nor have I had time (or the seeds) to plant any okra. And today the farmer came and sprayed his beans again, so the plants that have managed to survive so far may get speckled. *sigh*
But I didn't sit down to write about the garden. I sat down to write about fishing. Sort of.
My daddy loved to fish, and did so every chance he got. He fished for bait, then he used the bait to fish for bigger fish. He caught minnows out of a nearby creek, using a hardware cloth trap he made himself. I watched him do it. He would lace it together with wire and needle-nosed pliers. Sometimes, he'd let me do a little of the wiring. When it was finished, he'd take it down to the creek, bait it with a biscuit, and chunk it in the water. He'd tie it to something on the bank, and go back the next morning to see if he'd caught anything. Most of the time, he had, and he'd open the little hatch he'd built into the side, dump the minnows in a 5-gallon bucket half full of creek water, and take them home to await whatever fate he had in store for them.
He also knitted nets - trammel nets and hoop nets - out of nylon twine, for himself and for others. He used a wooden mesh pin that he whittled from a spare piece of window facing. Although he preferred plastic needles, I've seen him carve wooden ones out of a plank with his pocket knife when he was short of time and/or money. He would drive a nail into the window facing in the living room, and hang a loop on it. Onto the loop, he would "cast on" his rows.
I used to beg to him to let me knit, and sometimes he would, but he would never let me start a net - he said that the first row was the hardest part - or knit the throat. He would get a net going, then turn it over to me until either I got bored and wanted to quit or something different had to happen in the process, such as an increase or decrease. How he calculated the size is a mystery, something he never explained (or I never learned). I don't know how long the nets were, but I remember him sitting in a kitchen chair on the other side of the living room, knitting on a net that was hung on the nail in the window facing at the opposite end of the room, so they were pretty long. I don't know how wide they were, either, but I remember him flipping great widths of net when he started new rows, so they were pretty wide, too.
I recall holding big wooden hoops upright while he laced the nets onto them (he would let me use them as hula hoops until he needed them). He generally used 5 hoops, but I didn't pay much attention to the shape of the net when it was finished, or how he sewed them up.
Lately, the subject of net-making has crossed my path from several directions, and I decided to see if I could make some. Last week, I made a minnow trap out of hardware cloth. Had to get some online hints about how to make the throat, and wrestling that mother into place by myself was a mess (now I see why Daddy let me help him!), but otherwise things went well.
Then the subject of hoop nets came up . . . .
It's too early to tell if it's "so far, so good."
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