Fun with hay poles

I don’t know what you thought of when reading the title, but sorry, this is not so exciting, but I just didn’t have any creative ideas for any better title. Today I’ll tell you about a little project involving hay poles.

A hay pole is something used in the fields during harvesting season to gather the hay into organized piles for drying before taking it to the barn, or these days rolling it up into a ball of plastic that looks like a dinosaur egg. Also for at least the 5+ past years you’ve seen hay poles in all sorts of interior design and gardening magazines used as props, parts of furniture, etc.

Of course we had to get in on the act as well. We bought 6 old hay poles, nicely weathered to a gray tone, about 5 years ago. I don’t think we had any idea what to use them for, but just had to have them! Well, quite quickly we made them into triangular flower stands where we could hang flowers during the summer. Otherwise a great idea, but we don’t really have flowers at the Villa as we’re not there during the week and in the summer flowers would die, if we don’t water them several times a day.

So then the flower stands stood behind the shed for a year or two, until last summer when I dug them out to support the black raspberries we planted. However after looking at them for almost a year I decided they’re ugly. You agree, right?

So a nice, quick afternoon project got under way to make the supporting structure look somewhat prettier. First I (yes, I actually used power tools myself, for most of the time anyway…) took apart the triangles to have a stack of hay poles, which I then sorted by size to see what I could make out of them.

As I’m not a very creative person it was pretty obvious to me what I would do – just a square support frame which would allow the bushes to grow upwards up to their maximum height and along the way be tied to the beams for support. So I measured and started attaching the poles at approximately even intervals. It was a really quick step, didn’t take more than 30 minutes.

Here I needed some help from the Other Half as I couldn’t get all of the screws to go in properly. But the revised structure was now ready to be lifted up! We just stuck the bottom beams into the ground, as the rock is behind it also adds additional support. The structure itself is not very stable as there’s no crossbeams for stability, but for this purpose it should hold. And if it doesn’t, well, I’ll just have to revise again…

So this is what it looks like now:

Much prettier, don’t you agree? Especially once we get some fresh green leaves on the plants. I’m also eagerly awaiting to see whether we will already be getting some berries this year, as this will be the second year already…

Just for good measure here’s still the side-by-side comparison of before and after:

So pretty now compared to the before!