Bamboo-zled...

Wanting bragging rights for the best neighborhood garden means making sacrifices- blood loss, limb loss, a spade to the foot, a rake handle to the face, poison ivy, prickers and the whole lot of it.
Months of self-indulgent back patting go into planing the craziest garden.

Of course when harvest season comes around, it's a lot more face flushing shame and dissapointment whilst my neighbors are dragging heavy loads of veggies through their back doors and I scuttle timidly back to my kitchen with my pencil sized carrots and barbie-toy sized produce.
But if all else fails in my garden this year, I am still going to have one wickedly awesome bean teepee, thanks to my Aunt, and her generous neighbor.
We went bamboo hunting.

It's easy enough to find, but much harder to chop down. Which is why I brought this very cool blade.

......Whhhhhhich didn't really work at all on the hollow bamboo, but is great on probably anything else that doesn't want to shatter and splinter into a thousand peices when you hack into it... but it was Oh so much fun to try...

After my Aunt did all the hard work of chopping the bamboo down (with her practical, plain and ordinary saw that worked just brilliantly) and dragging it out of the thicket and sawing it into the proper sized peices (except for maybe that one, but the tape-measure was to blame) :)

The bamboo was tied into easy to carry bundles.

 One of the best things about bamboo is that it's super strong, incredibly lightweight, and filled with nothing but air. Like me. ;)                             Kidding.
But it does make garden structures really easy to assemble if you're not an amazon woman, or don't have a man around to do all of the grunt work. (Am I setting a women's movement back or something? I like playing the damsel in distress to my buff hubby...especially when I'm feeling lazy)

All that was left was a bit of tricky finagling, elbow grease, kicking and shoving and then my Aunt's smarts and ta-da!

Bamboo hunt successful....