Tools, Furniture, and Stuff

UPDATE:  We have a winner (chosen randomly) and it’s Shelley Bates, who entered on behalf of the Hillside Victory Community Garden in Hillside, NJ.  Congrats to all the community gardeners who’ll be using their new Spin Bin!

The nice folks at Clean Air Gardening have offered a brand new $170 Spin Bin Composter to one lucky reader-commenter, and honestly, I wish I could enter.   It’s a new product that was designed to solve some known composter problems, especially for city dwellers.  Of course that includes rodents, the number one question urbanites have about composting, and this bin keeps them out.  It also has 20 ventilation slots for adequate aeration, and four thermometer ports for checking the temp without having to open up the bin.  It also seems easy to move.

To Win

• Just leave a comment telling us why you want it, how you’ll use it – anything about your experiences with composting, past or future – and the winner will be chosen randomly from all commenters.
• The contest closes Friday, June 4 at 6 p.m. EDT.
• U.S., lower 48 only, please, due to shipping cost.
• I’ll be asking the winner to please send me an email about how the composter is performing.  Readers want to know!

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

For years I used cheap reversible gloves, which were incredibly easy to use because any two gloves would do the trick.   But after my favorite garden center stopped carrying them I couldn’t find them anywhere.

The gloves I settled on as a substitute are also cheap and I buy them by the dozen, but they’re not reversible and I usually grab two rights or two lefts.   I posted once asking for ways to solve this (petty by any standard) problem, and also suggested to glove-makers that they make all left gloves one color and all right gloves another for us hurried gardeners too busy or distracted by new cultivars (or something) to check the leftness or rightness of each glove.

I know that in the 12-Step world this would be called a higher-order problem, but still, it IS fun to find the solution.  Especially when it’s so damn simple, like the two white glove buckets you see here.  I drop right gloves in the bucket on the right, and so on, and I can’t tell you how pleased I was with myself for thinking this up.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Last year I became a veg-grower in earnest with my new Gardeners Supply “self-watering” containers, but they still needed huge quantities of water and the lugging of water from the kitchen sink became a prime gardening task.  (Still, totally worth it because those vegetables were so much fun to grow, and the produce was pretty awesome even to a nonfoodie like myself.)  I asked for ideas and was even sent a very curious “water vest”, which I’ll be testing for readers as soon as they send me the attachments.

But it won’t be the pots on the deck that get watered with the water vest because Eureka – I’ve found a much better solution and it’s so obvious I can almost hear a collective “Duh!” as I’m typing this.  It’s a 50-foot old garden hose and adjustable nozzle that arrive on the deck from the spigot below via a handy hole drilled through the wood.  It can even be left ON all the time with no leakage – good lord, how easy is that?

Read about what I learned as a newbie container veg-gardener here on GardenRant.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Next up in our on-going exploration of garden furniture – what's long-lasting and affordable – I have to show you my teak bench.  Sure it's more expensive -  I paid $320 for it about 20 years ago, fully assembled and retail – but then I did absolutely nothing to it and it still looks perfect to this day!  Up close you'd see that it's smooth, with no splinters – truly amazing.  It’ll certainly outlast me.

Ah, but is teak sustainably harvested?  Planet Green sums it up nicely for us – " Two out of the three species of teak are endangered, and all have been subjected to unsustainable forestry practices for decades", so mostly, no.  If you have your heart set on it there IS a certification for sustainable harvesting of teak and one company that's attained it is East Teak.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

I recently reported the death of my Adirondack chairs and actually received condolence for my "tragic" loss!  That was Stuart in Australia, saying he'd learned about them from me and considers them iconic of my garden.  Well, I do, too, but not to worry – they can be replaced!  In fact, I found a few zillion of them at AdirondackChairs.com, a site that seems to handle e-commerce for a bunch of furniture makers and even provides customer reviews á la Amazon, so I'm there.

Cheap and Lovely

Now the cheapest chairs are made of pine, like my rotted and falling apart ones, also cedar or fir.  In defense of this option, my pine chairs would have lasted longer if I'd taken the time to repair the inevitable gouges and cracks that come with softwoods.  These cheapies start at only  $69, and some are even painted for you already.  Above you see the cedar "Coral Coast" painted cherry red and only $100.  Or there's Natural Cedar for $73.  Or the lovely green made of cypress for only $80.  I love the look of all of them, but then I've never seen an Adirondack I didn't like.

"Eco-Friendly" and Not So Cheap

Now let's explore the options actually labeled "eco-friendly" by this e-commerce dealer, starting with their highest rated.  It's the Hyre's Country, made of "environmentally friendly wood from sustainable forests" and costing a much heftier $243.  Turns out the wood is "Red Meranti Mahogany" which really needs those quotes because it's not a real mahogany but a tropical hardwood called Shorea (shown on the left).  The other "sustainably harvested" tropical hardwood available is Brazilian cherry, but if it's from, you know, Brazil, there are other "eco" tests it just won't pass, and with any tropical hardwood I'd have to research a little deeper than the claims on one e-commerce website, wouldn't I?  And I don't want to.  So, moving on.

The largest offering in the eco line are chairs made of recycled plastic – just like the fencing recommended by Ed Begley - which is also called polyethylene resin for you particular types.  They're all maintenance-free and made in the U.S.  The best-sellers in this bunch are made by Great American Woodies in Ohio and they just happen to come in my favorite garden accent color of all – TEAL!  (Also white, black and sand.)  A lifetime guarantee would set me back $330 each but I'm thinking the $220 chairs with the five-year guarantee would be just fine. 

And the Winner Is

The Ohio-made plastic chair in teal!  Sure, $220 is more than twice what the softwood costs but dang, that no-maintenance feature is worth it.  Oh, and recycled, too~!  Really, what's not to love?  Merry Christmas, Self!

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Just look at them in their youth, just not anchoring but commanding that corner of the garden – and so right in their coupleness.  Made of pine, they'd cost about a hundred bucks each, and with a couple of coats of semi-gloss teal, they'd become prime accent pieces.  Plus darn comfortable seating with built-in side tables in their flat, wide arms.  Great design that will never die.

Trouble is, with wood as soft as pine, cracking and gouging happen, and the loving care I gave them in the assembly and paint stage didn't persist through the boring job of patching those gouges and cracks.  Thus, the rotting. 

So after giving 11 seasons of exemplary service to the garden and the gardener, Ye Old Adirondacks are falling down and not getting back up. 

Now gardeners, you all know what that means, right?  The chance to buy something new!  And the search begins – report coming soon.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Yes, it's finally come to that.  First, just admitting that I'd never, ever use it as a fireplace again took 5 years of it sitting there taking up good space on my deck.  (Okay, there was plenty of room on what one neighbor has dubbed an aircraft carrier and I call a roomy deck.)

Then came the decision to turn it into a garden ornament, aspiring to the fake-natural found-shard look.  It looked silly standing upright but on its side, maybe.  At least in May I thought so.  But design-wise there's no right place for it anywhere – anywhere that I can imagine.  See, it's not as if I can deftly move it from spot to spot and assess the look – it's too damn heavy for that.

Then after a landscape architect friend suggested a new focal point in a greatly expanded border, I tried really hard to convince myself that this, finally, was the place to repurpose the old chiminea, then decided that I just don't have the design chops to pull it off.  Or that the whole garden – a lush, green, Eastern backdrop -  is wrong for a big Spanish-style thing.

So yesterday I made the decision to liberate myself and my garden from the burden of this thing once and for all, and posted "Free Chiminea" on my neighborhood Yahoo group, which immediately yielded one taker and a back-up.  Let them try to love it, and maybe even succeed. 

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

I heard Begley speak to DC’s Green Festival yesterday and he sounded rapturous about his recycled-plastic fence (as ugly as it sounds).   In fact, during the Q&A he was asked what his favorite recycled product was and again, the fence!  So I had to check this out. 

Here on the Timberwolf website are lots of colors and styles and the claim that it’s cheaper than vinyl and comparably priced to wood, but far less maintenance.  And made from at least 90 percent recycled products.

My questions:  Does it look like real wood up close?  And does it come in 3-foot sections for neighbor-friendly front-yard fences?  I’m in the process of having a natural cedar fence installed, so it’s too late for me to consider this option, but readers have asked, so here you have it from the Eco-Actor himself!

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

This is interesting.  First, I find out my neighbors LOVE the English ivy that’s been hiding my chain-link fence since the mid-80s, and they’re really surprised that I don’t.   Okay, so they have no idea how much work it is just to keep it from covering the sidewalk in one direction and the mixed borders on the other.  And I guess I can imagine thinking that English ivy is pretty, though I sure don’t.  You can tell from this photo, though, that I’ve been chopping the ivy off at its base, killing it as fast as possible, and there’s no turning back now.  (Also, see that bent fence post?  Yep, that’s my driving!  Fortunately hidden by that ivy all these years.)

But then when it became clear that the chain-link fence was going, going, gone, everyone on the street let me know they’d prefer that I have no fence at all, that I leave it open so they can see my garden.  

Now there was once a time when fences – especially the chain-link variety – were commonplace on my street – in fact, all over town.  But that was before gentrification, and these days all those tacky fences are gone – except mine and one other, an ugly white vinyl.  But look how exposed my little front-yard garden looks in the next photo, with no fence to keep the dogs away.  Yep, dogs are the number one reason I’m paying good money for another fence (a good-looking cedar one).  No matter that dogs are always on a leash in my ‘hood.  The dog-walkers pay no attention while their beloved digs in and craps on gardens along the walk, including my curbside garden full of super-tough plants.  Yes, I notice.  I remember.

 But you know what else a fence does?  It creates a space.  Enclosure is a big deal in garden-making!  Not that I want a tall or solid fence.  It’ll be 4 feet tall but much more see-through than the damn ivy was.  Real neighborly-like.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }