A 44 gallon drum

I have this old 44 gallon drum in the garden to use when washing the soil off the roots of plants and it is aging nicely with a wonderful blue surface.

Fiskars shrub rake

Fiskars 'shrub rake'

Gardeners can spend a lifetime acquiring their tools of the trade. Some of the best garden tools I have found have been for sale at local market stalls , old tools re-fashioned or made-over by weather beaten men of European extraction who look as if they have spent a lifetime tilling the soil.Their callused hands caress the wooden handles as part of the sales pitch while I ponder what use I can put to an ancient scythe more at home on the Russian steppes of a previous century. Occasionally I get excited about a new tool and marvel about how well designed it is. This Finnish designed shrub rake is so called because in the northern hemisphere, where lawn does not grow like stink as here, it finds a use for removing leaves which fall over beds of ground cover and for reaching up over hedge plants to remove the spent prunings. To a certain extent these uses make it ideal for any part of the gardening world but in Australia rakes are mostly associated with lawn care and in this use it does not disappoint either. This is the perfect small rake with a 140mm wide head for use in narrow tight garden corners. The handle is lightweight aluminium, strong and long for hard raking over lawn or for reaching up onto the top of shrubs to retrieve pruned branches. Ten out of ten thanks Fiskars.

Gardening Hoes

Once upon a time I was a disciple of the 'no dig' method of gardening and my shed was filled with boxes of yellowing newspapers waiting to be layered on the ground at a given opportunity and dutifully covered with straw and compost before planting. Then I stopped buying newspapers, going instead for the online content or the breaking stories courtesy of Sky. All the while I was discovering that working the soil was a much better option than 'no dig', for under all those decaying newspapers lived small armies of earwigs, pincers at the ready when exposed to light and families of slugs delightfully entwining in each others shiny slime. Not only these creatures at work but strange white lace of fungal mycellium like nets across the soil surface often appeared. My soil was crying out for a bit of lights, camera , action... So out from the back of the tool shed came my various tillers and hoes. Many of these are home made, improvised and crafted from bits left over and attached to new handles. The single bladed hoe is great for hilling up the soil around leeks or moving soil up around the base of squash and zucchini to give them a firmer footing in the soil. It also has the the ability to chop at some of the more firmly rooted weeds which take hold such as dock or thistles. The three pronged tiller is my favourite as it is lightweight and the thin prongs are able to go deep enough to lightly cultivate the soil as well as lift small weeds right out of the ground. There are always some weeds which can only be removed by hand and these are the ones that grow too close to the base of the particular vegetable or flower. I still use lots of mulch such as pea straw or sugar cane but instead of leaving it as a single layer on the surface of the soil it gets broken up and mixed with the top soil layer as I go along the row. The soil surface is uneven, with some parts covered in clumps of mulch and other parts exposed but at least now the soil is happy and has developed a great texture and 'crumble'. Happy Gardening..........