Tangled Branches: Cultivated
happenings in and around my zone 6b gardens in northern Virginia and in central Virginia
Saturday, May 03, 2008
Garden Bloggers' Hoedown
There is an embarrassing lack of hoes at Tangled Branches. Well, I do have one, but it's stashed behind some other unused tools and I didn't feel like digging (sorry) it out.
That doesn't mean the garden is total weeds though. I just like to get personal with my weeds - face-to-face sort of thing. So, to join in Carol's Garden Bloggers' Hoedown, let me introduce you to my weeding tools.
Clockwise from top-right, we have a cultivator-mattock thingy (Does this have a proper name? I don't know it.); an asparagus knife, aka dandelion digger (The catalog called it an asparagus knife, but this one is very different.); my old trusty trowel; and my new favorite, the Hori-Hori knife. My biggest weeding tool covers the background of the photo - mulch!
Now, a good gardener would have taken one of those tools in hand and dispatched that poor dandelion immediately. Me, I went in the house to see how the pictures turned out.
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
Best Crocus and a Cool Tool
I like all my crocuses, but I like 'Ruby Giant' the best.
A couple of warm days, a thundershower and voila! beautiful dark purple flowers magically appear. The color draws me to it - so vivid and bright after gray and brown winter.
With the warmer weather coming up, and having experienced some GRTH over the winter, my thoughts are turning to.....exercise. Not a lot of exercise, just a walk around the neighborhood. If I'm going to call it exercise, maybe I should measure it and record it in a spreadsheet and make charts of my weight vs. how far I walked and estimated number of calories burned and....oh, forget it - too complicated. But there's this really cool tool - RunningMap.com - for measuring the distance and elevation changes of your route. You give it an address or street name and it gives you a map. You can show just the map or a satellite photo or a map/satellite hybrid. Then start clicking away to draw your route. It measures the distance covered in a straight line between each click and gives you a cumulative total. Fun, especially for a map geek like me. I could sit here and draw walking routes all day...
Monday, July 30, 2007
Ro Ho Ho
...and a bottle of rum. Thanks to Rosengeranium's comment on Carol's post about her new cultivator, I can't remove pirates from my mind. Actually, I'll need a bottle of rum for me, and a bottle of 3-in-1 for the cultivator in order to remove the grime and rust. I started to clean it up for its closeup and decided it was a bigger job than I wanted to take on right now. So here's my grandmother's Ro Ho cultivator, cleaned up just enough to be presentable.
I have no idea how long Grandma had this. This one is not exactly the same as Carol's - the paint colors are different (a fetching DOT orange and pale lime design), and I don't see any indication that there ever was any paint or stamp with the manufacturer's name on the wood.
After reading Natalya's comment, I'm thinking of putting this implement back into use. The soil at my central Virginia garden is a nice sandy loam - this might be just the thing to work up the potager in the spring.
Labels: tools
