I'm sure Steve didn't say it quite that way, he's looking out for our best interest, afterall. So, we made a call to our supplier who said that he was fresh out of pencil rods! Wait...I thought he said that he had enough to supply us. A lot of people must be planting vines this spring. What are pencil rods, you ask. They are 4 foot long and 1/4-inch in diameter, each weighting 0.510 pounds, and each costing approximately 52 cents. We will be planting 6804 plants so we need at least 6804 pencil rods in order to stake the newly planted vines so they don't flop over. My husband used the grapevine network and got helpful tips on using bamboo as a backup. But after a lot of calling, it was Steve to the rescue!
He knew of a person who was interested in selling his used pencil rods and Steve negotiated a good price for us. So, off we went this morning to Long Island via the Cross Island Ferry to meet Charlie. It was about 12:30 when we called Charlie who gave us directions and said that we can start picking out the pencil rods even if he wasn't there. We decided to bundle the rods into 30 pieces each, which is about 15.3 pounds. Charlie came about 30 minutes later. We introduced ourselves and thanked him because without his pencil rod stash, Steve wouldn't plant our vines! After a few minutes, Charlie said he needed to go for lunch so we continued with our pencil rod sorting and bundling. Our truck can only carry half a ton so we had to be careful about how many pencil rods we loaded onto the truck. After three hours of work, we had only bundled 2,000 pencil rods and had 5,000 more to go. Just about this time, Charlie showed up and provided a solution. He said that his crew could put the remaining pencil rods into a galvanized horse trough. Gary and Bill will come back at the end of the week with a flat bed truck to pick up the rest. Steve, we're ready!
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