Grapevines and Exercise Balls

The stone loading and moving is still going on, weather permitting.  Carl has been helping me with the tidying up whenever he has a few spare moments since Aaargh construction has come to a halt.  I have a problem with the changing seasons; I'm just not ready to throw in the towel for this year yet.  Someone told me today at exercise class that next week is Thanksgiving.  Wow. I was stunned.  It can't be that late already, can it?  I don't have the statuary put away, there's flower pots all over the place, garden hoses need draining, the garage and barn needs organizing and, ok, I'll get a grip.  There's a whole bunch of stuff to do.

Carl loading stone on pallets.

 And then I go and dream up some more work.  First the grapevine saga:

 We had an abundance of grapevines growing on the old rock pile in the picture above. Trying to get to the rocks on the pile was a hassle, talk about a tripping hazard; I swear if we held still long enough, they'd have us engulfed, too.  The vines were growing up into the spruce trees nearly twenty feet and yanking on them by hand was proving an exercise in futility.  Tractors to the rescue; Carl hooked chains up to the roots and with me backing the tractor, the vines came down bringing along with them spruce branches and sumac trees and anything else in their path. By the time the silly things were free of the rock pile, the tractor and I were nearly out to the road. 

Well, what do you do with grapevines?  Burn them?  Compost them?  Yes, you could.  Or we could make wreaths out of them, but I already have a couple.  That's when I got the bright idea of making a big orb.  But how do you make it perfectly round?  I had done some research and came across an article where a lady was using beach balls to make grapevine balls.  Ernie the Urn needs something for the winter but we don't have any beach balls.  And a beach ball would be lost in Ernie.  We need to think bigger. 

Hmmmmm...I do own an exercise ball.

I'd been wanting a new Swiss ball  for quite some time.  My original one is over ten years old and has seen better days; there was a particularly deep gouge in it on one side.  Since I've started the weight lifting routine one of the exercises I have to do is called a 'Prone Jackknife'.   As you can see from the video above (no that's not me) there is a lot of stress placed on the equipment.   There's a few other silly exercises I have to do, too, and the thought of the old Swiss ball suddenly exploding mid-jackknife or pushup was rather terrifying.  I know the resulting crash of my face plowing into the hardwood floor wouldn't help my looks any.  And I would hate to startle my snoozing Shih Tzus, too.

So, I purchased a new Swiss ball (with sand inside so it doesn't roll away so easily) and we put the old ball to use as a grapevine form.  I didn't do much with the construction other than fetch and trim errant branches off the grapevines for Carl as he rolled and tucked them into place around the ball.  It was amazing how many grapevines were required, but we had enough to go around.

 I forgot to take pictures of the process, but here's the end result.
 

Ernie's Ornament

One thing we forgot to do was deflate the ball and take it out of the middle before there were too many branches in place.  I didn't think we'd ever get the ball out, but Carl didn't have a problem.  We might make a few more this jumbo size before the snow flies, but first I had Carl make me some smaller ones, too.

Smaller ones lining the driveway on the plant stands.

Carl just rolled the vines into a circle without anything in the middle for the smaller ones.  They're not perfectly round, but they're close enough.  I've got some ideas for decorating them with mini-lights and some greenery.  We'll see if I get around to it.  As you all know, I'm dreadfully unorganized. 

In the meantime, I'm getting the hang of the new exercise ball.  It's so much more stable with the sand inside.   When I'm not exercising, I could use it as a step stool to reach high things in the kitchen cupboard, too.

On second thought, maybe that's not such a good idea.