What are your favourite gadgets, garden tools and implements?
This is my favourite at the moment, my fruit and veg collecting bag. You can lift it by the handles, have it strapped round your waist, or over your shoulder so you have both hands free for picking. It is soft so it doesn't bruise the fruit, and washable, and it holds a good amount. Excellent!
Here is a photo with a clothes basket of apples I've just gathered.
Wow Pat those are nice looking apples! Must be nice to able to go out and pick apples (and cherries! ) in your garden. I sure hope my appletrees will give me a few someday :-) That bag sure sounds handy - I have to go and pick the red currants - they're almost too ripe - would be nice to have one of those! :-)
I don't think I have any favorite gadgets or tools - hmmmmm.... need to think about this one for a while!
edited for spelling ;-)
This message was edited Sep 3, 2006 11:49 PM
That looks like something I could really do with Pat! Would be good for eggs as well - I'm forever forgetting to take something suitable with me when I go to the hens...... Where did it come from?
my favourite is the daisy grubber I got from Woolworth's years ago. Sorry no photo at the moment
Sorry to have to ask philomel but what is a daisy grubber? (Just wondering if that's something I have to look for too LOL!!!) Seems I'm missing some nifty gardening equipment - can't think of a favorite ........
Yes, sorry rannveig, that is a strange name lol. It's used for getting between paving stones etc, or for longish rooted plants. It has a handle and then a thick blade with a swan neck and then the blade divides at the end so that it will have a prong either side of the crown of the unwanted plant. The swan neck means that you can then lever the plant out of the ground. I'll take a photo some time - but have visitors today......
Other than that my border fork is my best friend. That's a teenage version of a full sized digging fork. It means that I can use it easily - being not over blessed in the height department - and it's good for getting between plants too.
Thanks for clearing that up Philomel! I have something similar to it, I think, but it doesn't have a split at the end .....
Lovely looking apples there Pat, great container too, really handy, I could have done with that yesterday, I was trying to gather in plums, and too lazy to walk in doors to get something I used my t-shirt hem folded over...
I've heard of a daisy grubber ,but never seen one.
there's probably more tools that I don't use that I do , a dearth of them in fact, lying sad and defunct in the garage, covered in cobwebs and dust.I tend to use whats near to hand at the time when I'm doing something, improvising.
My favourite, or most used tool is an old thin bladed sharp knife.I use it to weed between paving stones, make holes in compost for cuttings, prize out seedlings to plant on, cut off seed heads etc..the only problem with it is that is has a really sharp tip, and I've lost the amout of times I've had it tucked in a pocket and managed to stab myself with it, either in the leg bending over or the arm reaching for it...guess I ought to find something a bit safer really.
The harvesting bag is from Vigo, but Harrods Horticultural also sell them and I've seen them in a few other catalogues recently. I had never seen one before, but now they are appearing everywhere - shows how good they are.
I'm also very fond of my daisy grubber it is also excellent for quickly lifting creeping buttercup - roots and all.
Your pointy knife sounds dangerous Sue - a bit like my ladder!
So you have to battle with creeping buttercup as well - that's a plant I could well do without. I'm lucky enough that the garden next to ours has an old vegetable garden that hasn't been tended to in very many years and it's completely overgrown with creeping buttercup! Guess where they're creeping to - over to my garden! It's a constant battle guarding the border from unvanted migrants!! lol
I have a small "hand fork"(?) that I use mostly to do my weeding - works well in getting those pesky buttercups and dandelions!
I'm ashamed to say that I have a plethera of tools scattered (and inevitably lost) around my garden, i have this naughty habit of just sticking the towel/fork into the soil where I last worked, then spending hours looking for it again.My children keep buying me more and more hand tools, which all join the ranks of those 'left' in position.
In the winter quite q few come to light again though.
It drives my sister Paddy nuts up the allotment, she's the exact opposite to me, she's a real neat freak, and likes the shed just so, even down to a blackboard in there , with chalk, to list the chores to be done!!...LOL.Last time we were up there, I came accross my old fork which was hidden in some overgrown section, had to bribe the guy i was talking to at the time of discovery not to tell her...
Sueone I do that too! Keep losing things and spending lots of time finding it again. I blame it on the fact that I hardly ever get a chance to actually finish what I'm doing - my girls always need me or it's time to make dinner before I'm done ...... It probably has more to do with the fact that I'm such a scatterbrain that when I'm interrupted and start doing something else I forget what it was I was doing before! Once I was planting a rose and had the hole dug and the rose in when one of my girls called me so I ran inside. About two hours later I remembered that I'd been doing something outside - couldn't remember what - but went outside and walked around the house until I saw the rose standing in the hole I'd dug! Fortunately it was raining so the roots didn't dry! My husband found a hand rake thing for weeding the other day that had been lost since last summer - I'd been wondering all summer where it could be .... guess that's why I've been using that little fork instead! LOL
