The garden gloves have been getting quite a workout lately, with all of the bamboo rhizome pruning and other garden cleanup.
Do you keep on using old tools that you've had for years, even though you may have newer ones that were supposed to be "better"? I have that situation with my main trowel -- I use a no-name one that I probably bought at a big box store 15 years or more ago. It's got a better shape than the newer branded trowel that I received as a gift several years back, so I just keep using the old one.
Since I've been writing this blog for almost five years now with almost 1600 posts, you'd think that I would repeat myself quite often. It seems inevitable that I'd inadvertently visit at least a few topics more than once, doesn't it? Good gardens change every year though, as do the viewpoints of their gardeners. Throw unpredictable weather, some travel, and pure chance/luck into the mix and you get almost continual variety in post subjects. Repeating myself hasn't been a problem (I hope).
Or maybe a better title for this post would be "Wheelbarrow no tip"? But I'm jumping ahead... If you're like me you've got loads of yard waste to haul around at this time of year: heaps of "hay" from the ornamental grasses that just received their annual pruning, sticks of all kinds, leaves, leaves, leaves.
I've talked about plant markers or labels before, and how my favorite is using a strip of vinyl window blinds written on with pencil. It's a fantastic solution for potted plants, but I've wanted something that I could use to label some of my in-ground plants: shrubs, bamboos, roses, etc.
The extra dirt I apparently like to carry around that is. I don't do it intentionally, but it happens. You see, these gloves are so comfy, flexible, and sturdy that I don't really notice when they start getting a bit... stiff.
I've mentioned that I've been cleaning out the garage lately. One garden tool that I've had for a few years but was buried behind a lot of, um, important stuff (not junk, honest!) is an old reel mower that I got from my mother-in-law:
I've always bought the cheapest work gloves I could find, which usually means getting something canvas, or combination thin suede/canvas. The type of gloves that are $3 a pair, or 2 pair for $5. There are three problems with those cheap gloves: they're very uncomfortable, they don't last very long, and they get dirty fast in the garden. Last March I decided to buy a pair of more expensive work gloves:
Yesterday's post was a look back over last year's posts, but today I take a look back even further to show you how things have changed. Have you ever considered buying a garden tiller of some sort? Do you own one already? How did you choose it, from an ad in a gardening magazine perhaps? If so, then I can probably take a guess what you have: either a Mantis tiller, or a model from DR. Why would I guess those? Because they're just about the only advertised tillers I see these days, or are certainly the most widely advertised.
A while back I wrote about my new work boots, what I'll be wearing when digging, mowing, essentially doing anything other than strolling around the garden. When I am just walking around though I wear something more casual. Actually they're not that casual, as they're shoes made of leather, not the colored spongy plastic that is so popular in the garden and everywhere else these days (for good reason).
Although it's not quite time to start seeds -- even the types that need a big head start on the season like cardoon and some other seeds that have long germination times -- my growing table is really about as messy as it can be, and I thought I should get started on it now, rather than waiting until I need it to be clean. Since there's probably nothing interesting about watching me clean a table, I'm going to turn this into the first half of a look at my setup here, as some people have asked about it.
Although I feel like I could work in the garden every day, all year long, it's probably good that there are a few months during the winter when there's not much I can do. It's a great time to inspect all of the tools that I'm too busy using during the growing season too even think about, let alone inspect or replace.
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