Tools, Furniture, and Stuff

Readers who’ve followed changes in my garden this season (and have I given you any choice?) know that last spring I removed my hated Bradford pear (yay!!), which left my garden chairs in full sun most of the day and thus unusable most of the season.  No problem, I say to myself.  I’ll just rearrange and level the area to create space for a new umbrella.  Six weeks later it arrives and well, it does create a bit of shade, maybe enough for one of these chairs, but only if you tilt it, a feature that seemed like such a fine idea in the catalogue.  Turns out the tilt’s actually damn hard to maneuver and that’s because the umbrella’s made of solid wood, another feature that’s better on paper than in the field.

How did I make this mistake, choosing an umbrella that’s both too small and too heavy?  My first line of defense is to blame catalogue shopping.  If I’d seen the damn thing in person I like to think I’d have noticed it was rather small and heavy and chosen aluminum poles, lightweight fabric, and 9′ in diameter instead of 6.  But I can’t blame mail order shopping entirely and at the risk of wandering into Dr. Phil’s territory, here’s something I hate about myself.  In the process of ordering it I automatically and instinctively chose the cheapest one.  (I’d blame my tightwad parents but Phil would never let me get away with it.)  For another $50 I could have shaded both seats, and probably without the annoying tilt thingie.

If only I’d bought in person I might be sitting in the fine shade of an umbrella like this one on the deck of my smarter and wealthier neighbors.  It’s nice and big and made of aluminum and a lightweight fabric.  Some too-late research tells me these umbrellas cost about $800 at Smith and Hawken (ouch!) or waaay less (about $100 for a 9′ aluminum) from some fine Internet sources.

Now the last thing I ever want to do is discourage you all from buying outdoor umbrellas to shade your Adirondack chairs (okay, other types of chairs work just as well).  So now that I’ve done the research – and made the mistakes – go forth and buy.  There must be some end-of-season deals out there for bargain-hunters.   If you dare to go the cyber route, searching "outdoor umbrellas" should do the trick.

Everybody loves these homemade hypertufa pots, even after they’ve seen the sudden pot death that can result if they’re made too thin (or maybe if the winter’s too severe – who knows?)  Here the bowl-shaped pot second from the left, my favorite of the bunch, suddenly split open last month.  Whatever.  For something that costs about 2 bucks and looks great, I’ll deal with an uncertain lifespan.  As for the other, thicker ones, they’re holding on after 4 years.

And before somebody writes to ask what the hell hypertufa is, it’s a mix of Portland cement, perlite and peatmoss, a formula that produces a reasonable facsimile of the stone troughs traditionally used in rural England for feeding animals – hence they’re often called hypertufa troughs. The real things are scarce, heavy and expensive, thus the appeal of homemade substitutes.  The mixture is pounded inside the walls of a container, like the bucket, cooler and kitty littler container used for most of these, or on the outside of an overturned container, such as the wok top that formed the broken one here. (Click to enlarge.)  I’ve given workshops in making hypertufa and I gotta say it’s one unholy mess.  Somehow, like making mudpies, it’s also a helluva lot of fun.

For plants, I’ve used only succulents like sedums and hens and chicks.  These drainage-demanding plants love the natural porousness of hypertufa and I love the very low watering needs of the succulents, so everybody’s happy as can be.

If there are any hypertufa-makers out there, tell us what plants have worked, how long the pots have survived, and hey, just anything on your mind that’s remotely on point.

Newbie gardeners these days have it easy.  Thanks to gardening blogdom, they get to read what real gardeners say about the down-and-dirty of real gardening.  Like this little piece of advice I’m happy to pass on. You don’t have to spend 20 years digging with the wrong damn tool like I did because I’m telling ya right now, the pickaxe is the clear winner in the Takoma Digging Trials.  The shovel, the tool that’s singlehandedly upped the annual income of my physical therapist, is for lifting and moving the dirt, not digging it.  Ya dig?  Oh, the shovel could handle digging in store-bought potting soil or pure compost, but the rock-imbedded clay on my property?  No fricking way.

[Photo - an improvement over the standard pickaxe shot I first included here.  And the umbrella's my temporary solution to the full-sun here resulting from the removal of a Bradford pear.  A better umbrella is coming soon.]

Oh, it’s been a long haul for me and my Sears gas-driven lawnmower.  Bought used in 1985 and serviced only once, it’s not only served my needs but those of several of my neighbors.  Yes, here in Crunchy Takoma we share mowers and power washers and spreaders and mulch deliveries and lots more stuff I don’t know about in the child care department. 

But back to what’s really important, the mower.  Our relationship began to crumble last spring after I replaced the railroad-tie steps leading to my back lawn with huge but rough boulders.  They’re gorgeous and oh, so naturalistic, but I had to carry the damn mower as I was going up and down, so I began to get a bad attitude toward mowing.  Like whining about having to do it.  And I’d always loved that clean new look you get from this simple act, which takes me only 30 minutes for the front and back lawns combined, thanks to gradual turf reduction over the years.

So recently I let my fingers do the walking and ordered this little guy, a 13-inch electric mower made in China under the terribly unsexy brand name of Yard Machines, for $120 delivered to my door.  I know cords are supposed to be a pain but I was willing to give it a try for my small lawns.

THE RESULTS  Wherein I discovered what a different experience mowing electrically really is, different in good ways.  Working with such a lightweight machine is a pleasure, and most of all, there’s the quiet.  Now, I’ve never been bothered by the sound of a gas mower myself but it’s always been frustrating, in the hot, steamy days of high summer, to have to wait till 9 a.m. to do my mowing, when the air is cool and I’m ready to go at 5:30. With this guy being so quiet, I can mow whenever I want to. 

And then there’s the nice result of reducing the pollution I cause while I’m here on Earth.  I read recently that thanks to legislative inaction in this area, gas mowers produce 90 times the pollutants per gallon of gas as a 2006 car, which is much worse than I imagined back in my bad-old pollutin’ days.

Let me be the first to thank Andrea at Heavy Petal for the prize that arrived in today’s mail – a CobraHead "precision weeder and cultivator,"  which I won because my little essay on how I got started gardening was chosen as the best of the bunch.  Well, actually the four winners were chosen at random but who’s to know?   Having recently read some raves about this little tool on a garden forum I’d been perusing, I knew a good thing was coming my way.

And while I confess I haven’t tried it yet, I’m already convinced by the enthusiastic testimonials, one of which called it addicting.  Well, all I need is to become even more addicted to gardening, so I’ll take that as a precautionary note.

A quick question for my ever-astute readers, and a short comment.  First, the enclosed information tells me that "Working in conjunction with a good garden fork, there is no bed too tough to be quickly weeded."  Okay, what the hell is a garden fork?  My first guess was a cultivator but this tool is intended to be used to cultivate, so it can’t be that.  Guesses?  Could it be what we Easterners call a garden rake?

And there’s a testimonial that caught my eye. A gardener in Wisconsin wrote that she was amazed – exclamation point – because "I have always employed more of a soak it and pull by hand weeding style, rather than using a tool for the job. Battling weeds this way is just that, a battle."  No offense, but humans have been using tools now for, I don’t know, ages, and I wonder why she’d never given it a try until recently being given this one.  M. Sinclair Stevens in Texas, do you suppose the term "Luddite" would apply here, too?  (I was corrected when I referred to a computer-deprived tree-grower as a "Neanderthal" because apparently Neanderthals were enamored with technology, unlike the clueless Luddites of the world.  Now I’m using "Luddite" every chance I can.  Previously my favorite word was troglodyte, someone who lives in a cave.  Very handy word, too, and it’s nice to know the subtle differences, as I know Sinclair would agree.)

And Andrea, have you guys set a date?  Don’t keep us in the dark.