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Protective Gear That Won’t Slow You Down: Review of Gardening Knee Pads and Gloves
Many people avoid wearing gloves and knee pads to garden because they see these kinds of protective gear as getting between them and the experience of gardening. Either kneeling pads pinch the backs of your legs uncomfortably, or you can’t feel what you’re doing while wearing gloves. That’s totally valid, but there are things you…
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Hand Pruner Showdown: Felco VS Corona VS Bahco
Pruners are a sensitive topic among us gardeners. We all have our favorites and god help the person who champions a competing brand. But that’s what this pruner showdown is about, so please don’t throw tomatoes at me. (I’m only discussing bypass pruners here. Anvil pruners often crush the stems when they make a cut, so they…
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Where to Toss the Weeds? Buckets and Bags to Hold Garden Waste
This week, we’re honoring our love of gardening by taking a hard look at our rusty, underperforming hand tools, and seeing if there might be a better way to approach our routine gardening tasks. Gardeners really vary on how we like to deal with the trimmings and weeds we create when doing the rounds in…
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The Professional Gardener’s Tool Box – Basic Hand Tools
Most of the gardening that I do regularly, for clients and for myself, involves repetitive tasks. I spend most of my indoor gardening time thinking about the more artistic side of things – design, choosing plants, and artistic pruning – tasks that are unique to each space and plant. But outdoors, my time falls into…
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Radius GroundHog Rake: A Review in Photos
A client recently gifted me with this fantastic new tool, and I wanted to share it with you all, because I could tell within a few minutes of use that it was going to replace my old-school iron bow rake. She had both the GroundHog and the Garden Shark rakes, and offered me my choice.…
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Best of the Web: New Shade Perennials, Gardener’s Hide-a-Key, Veggie Gardening, and More!
Brrrr!!! In rainy Humboldt County, February’s usually the month my garden assistants turn to me in shock and say – “uh, I think the weeds are stuck!” The first time I tried to pull frozen, crystallized weeds out of the ground, I was pretty surprised, too. This year, February’s been glorious – a bit wet,…
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Last-Minute Gifts for Gardeners
I don’t know about you, but the actual getting-gifts-for-people part of Christmas kind of crept up on me, and I’m scurrying to find or make just the right thing for everyone I love. Gardeners can be hard to shop for, because so many people give us gifts that look pretty, but aren’t really that useful…
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The Enabled Garden; Gardening For Those With a Disability
I read an inspiring post by Fern over at Life On The Balcony this week with some tips for how to enjoy container gardening with physical limitations. She covers some great ways of training your plants to suit your needs, reducing watering, and choosing tools to make gardening easier. Fern makes an excellent point; containers…