Saturday, May 19, 2007

New Tools, part 2


Sometimes, what you already have works so much better than something you can buy.

This is a foot-long piece of #5 rebar left over from when we built the chicken coop's foundation. It is an EXCELLENT dibber for planting onions and small lettuce transplants. If I were a true garden geek I would figure out how to put a nice handle on it so I wouldn't end up with a stigmatum on my palm.

You know what else works well to poke holes in this clay? A nice pointy stick.

5 comments:

cookiecrumb said...

Oh, El. A dibber.
Go read this: my husband wrote it. He's a part-time blogger... I guess he doesn't get as much of a charge out of it as we do.

Anonymous said...

I tend to go with the nice pointy sticks, myself.

El said...

CC, that Cranky is a genius. Though I will say in my own covetous defense that I received one tool (a hori-hori: it's like Japanese ginsu for soil) from Smith and Markup that is my all-time favorite thing. It's just too skinny to poke a decent leek hole.

Tracy, sticks rule. I hope your pup can be distracted by them, and that he can stay off your beds! (I'm so glad you got another pooch.)

kate said...

You could always just wind duct tape around the end until you had a big knobby handle. (I seem to have a thing for duct tape these days... it's that time of year when I'm haphazardly repairing things in the garden...)

Pointy sticks are good too although it's wise to put something on the ends of these too ... I've had too many close encounters between my eyes and pointy sticks in the garden.

El said...

Kate, excellent idea. I have visions of Red Green dancing in my head, so of course the handle won't be the last use of that sticky tape in my garden! (I can see a duct-tape bench, more tools, etc.)