ToolTime

Before the end of  weary Winter comes, before the annual rite of gardening known as Spring cleanup begins, all Midwestern gardeners should take advantage of this idle time of their discontent to perform needed maintenance on their gardening tools.

This Spring, one of my long-procrastinated chores was finally accomplished.  Before I trimmed my first rose cane, before I lopped off my first apple branch, I removed the ten-year-old, nicked, moderately rusted blade of my Felco #2 pruners and replaced it with a clean, sharp, brand-new blade.  What, you don't have a Felco pruner?  You fell for the cheap K-Mart Martha Stewart anvil pruners or the quick-to-dull Walmart Fiskars? And you call yourself a gardener?  Shame on you.  Yes, I know the Felco pruners are more expensive initially, but being able to purchase and change the blades is one of the reasons you buy Felcos. Now I've got an essentially new pruner without having to purchase one and my Felcos will be good for another 10 years.  The blades, by the way, are readily available on Amazon.

There are, of course, other annual chores necessary to ready your garden tools for spring, but I accomplish many of these in the fall before putting the tools away for a winter's nap.   Lawnmower blades should have been sharpened and motor oils and air filters changed, and other lawnmowerish mechanical parts greased.  The handles of wood tools should have been coated with boiled linseed oil to protect and waterproof them for another season. No, not vegetable oil or regular unboiled linseed oil, you should have used boiled linseed oil because the latter is thicker and dries faster.

Hoes should have been sharpened and the new sharp edges protected from rust by a thick coat of axle grease.  Electric fences should be fortified and raised and perhaps connected to a lethal high-voltage transformer to deter deer and rabbits from stealing the bounty of your future garden. Hoses should be inspected for leaks and washers replaced in the hoses and connectors to prevent leaks.  And the gardener should begin a late-Winter physical conditioning program to prepare for the eventual aches and pains induced by early Spring cleanup.  I've long felt that one of the good aspects of sporadic good weather in the Midwest was the fact that gardeners have a few days of activity, and then a few days off to heal, gradually increasing the activity level and naturally conditioning the gardener.  It must be much harder for gardeners in Alaska where the weather finally gets nice on July 1st and then all your work has to be done before it turns too cold again on August 1st.

I used to watch my maternal grandfather smear grease over the surface of his plows and every other sharp tool he owned every Fall, and now, forty years later, I know why he did it.  In fact, if you do just about anything you ever saw your grandparents do to prepare for Spring, you'll likely be on the right track.  And buy a pair of Felco pruners.  Your rose canes will be grateful.

Wheelbarrow Schlemiel-barrow

Listen carefully.  I'm about to divulge my best, most-useful, most-fabulous gardening secret.  Wait for it....wait for it....

Get rid of your wheelbarrow. 

Wheelbarrows are medieval, cumbersome, unwieldy, often heavy, monstrosities that should be banned from gardening circles and left to muscular, sweaty construction crews.  Literally, although there is some evidence that the Greeks and Romans may have used something similar, the best evidence is that the wheelbarrow became popular during the dark Middle Ages of Western culture.  As far as I am concerned  it should have been left there in the Middle Ages. 

I don't own a wheelbarrow anymore.  I've had two in the past twenty years; a typical steel-bodied, one-wheel contraption, and a two-wheeled plastic cart.  Both suffered from the same problems in my eyes; limited payload sizes, a strong tendency to tip over on uneven surfaces and with large loads, tiresome to drag back up the Flint Hills after emptying, and finally, they just took up too much storage space.  I threw the last one out when it fell off its designated wall hanger and banged into my shin.

Instead, for the past five years, I've been happy using a simple flat bedsheet to collect all my spring garden debris.  The particular bedsheet I use, pictured at right, is an old one, in fact it was a wedding gift for us 28 years ago, our first set of married sheets.  Once retired from use for slumber and other indoor activities, it has been variously used over the years as a frost cover for plants, and as a dropcloth for painting walls and staining decks before it was requisitioned as a load-bearing device. In fact, it could still be used for most of  those activities without sacrificing its usefulness as my substitute barrow.  My "sheetbarrow."      

There are a number of advantages to a sheetbarrow, not the least of which is that you don't have to lift the load except to gather the forward three corners and angle them up a bit.  In that regard, it still functions as a somewhat flexible Class II Lever (I'm sorry to introduce Physics 101 into the subject).  The ground supports all the weight of the load and the energy to overcome the friction of a fairly smooth cotton surface against the smooth grass is substituted for the energy of bearing the weight of the load, to the benefit of my lumbar vertebrae.  It stays where you stop, never trying to continue downhill in an accelerating fashion. It won't tip over a heavy load and smash your toes.  It is light to carry back uphill after you dump the load and dumping the load is a simple matter of "flipping" the sheet. And it folds (or crumples) compactly for easy storage.      

Now, it's true, you could purchase a reinforced plastic tarp or an expensive, heavy cansas tarp and accomplish the same task, but an old bedsheet is lighter, and doesn't make the irritating crackly plastic noises of a store-bought tarp.  The stain and paint residue has left my bedsheet stiff in places and may have welded the fibers together to improve the material strength, but I've only got one small hole in it after five years of Spring use for all kinds of materials, including vast loads of thorny rose trimmings.  And perhaps it is true that the sheetbarrow works exceptionally well in my circumstances because I garden on a hill and deposit all the wastes at the bottom of the hill so that I'm always moving the weight downhill over a smooth mown grass surface.  But I can pile a lot of material, including limbs, on a bedsheet that I couldn't fit into a wheelbarrow and I've never had the bedsheet smash one of my toes. 

So rummage through your closet, grab an old bedsheet, and give it a try.  You may not agree that it performs quite as good as I've advertised, but I believe you'll find it an improvement over your typical hardware store wheelbarrow offering.  If nothing else, the memories evoked by the old sheet may keep a smile on your face as you trudge down and back from the debris pile. 

Witch Hazel Kool-aid

One of my many, many pet gardening peeves (which should be differentiated from the many pets that peeve me in my garden), is the manner in which the fiendish ghouls who create plant catalogues enlarge and enhance an otherwise insignificant flower until the catalogue reader (i.e. the gardener) is compelled to grasp frantically for the phone and credit card and purchase a dozen for their garden. Every Midwestern gardener who has ever drooled over a plant catalogue in the depths of a cold, snowy Winter could name at least one, if not several, horticultural mail-order firms that are notorious for the practice. Closeup, voluptuous pictures of Hybrid Tea roses are moderately tolerable, but the act of magnifying tiny asters or honeysuckle until  the gardener feels that he or she could utilize the flower as a scented and comfortable spare bedroom just isn't fair.  Heck, even the surface of male bovine manure looks interesting when viewed at a microscopic level, but it is still male bovine manure when viewed in normal size.

 I give you, as evidence of my dissatisfaction, the Witch Hazel. Witch Hazels are hailed as the first blooms of Spring in many areas, flowering boldly on leafless stems in late winter. Each flower has four slender strap-like petals that are always pictured everywhere as the most glorious, showy flower in all of Creation. Every gardener just has to grow one in our gardens, right?  Especially those gardeners who haven't seen anything but mist and snow and ice for the past three months?  For years, I indulged in the fantasy of adding one of these scented beauties to my garden so that I could advance Spring forward into Winter and enjoy the simple beauty of natural flowers without resorting to artificially forcing bulbs or flowering shrubs. Pictures such as that at the left drew me in; enormous, frilly, impossibly delicate, bright blooms that look as if they would cover your hand. I was told time and again that Witch Hazels were difficult to grow in Kansas, and in support of that wisdom, I admit that I have yet to find a surviving specimen in a public garden in this area.  But I couldn't call myself a gardener if I didn't at least try.  In fact, I failed the first time I attempted to overwinter an expensive specimen, but I'm now into my fourth year of survival of a 'Jelena' (Hamamelis x intermedia 'Jelena'), and I couldn't be more disappointed at the reality of the bush.

  

Garden writers are no better than garden photographers in describing that reality for us.  The late Henry Mitchell, in One Man's Garden, stated "Nothing equals the hybrid Asian witch hazels for delight in late January-February-early March, depending on the weather....Usually, as in the variety called 'Jelena', they are orange-bronze in effect and surprisingly showy."  Showy?  I, for one, loved Henry Mitchell's writing and use of language, but he failed me this time. If you, the reader, will think back really hard, you'll realize that you have never seen an entire, whole Witch Hazel bush pictured in bloom in a book. They are pictured in toto only as an example of nice fall foliage color. The real reason the blooms are always pictured in closeup is that in reality they are only 1-2 cm long and are practically invisible from 3 feet away regardless of the bright color. The same flower, without cropping and enlargement, actually is better represented by the picture at the right, a sad and impossible standard to worship, even for a winter-starved gardener.  If one has to use a magnifying glass to view a flower in the garden, the overall landscape benefits of the plant are dubious, at best. 

So, I don't know how many of you grow Witch Hazel and would agree with me, or how many have swallowed the Kool-aid whole and feel that I'm just a crotchety old gardener who expects too much and gripes too loudly.  But I submit to you that if we are all being truthful with one another, we would admit that Witch Hazel wouldn't be worth growing if it bloomed in June instead of February.  And in full disclosure, I am suspicious that my Witch Hazel is not actually 'Jelena'.  The blooms of my bush are more yellow than other pictures I've seen of the variety, and up till now the fall foliage has been uninspiring.  The most likely explanation is that I was sold a mislabeled plant and didn't obtain the variety I sought.   Which brings up another pet peeve.....