May 31, 2023
Tools
The package arrived on Friday, and so did guests. I left it sitting in the garage while I focused on the more important matter.
Yesterday, I opened the box. Inside were two tools, purchased from A.M. Leonard, supplier of horticultural tools since 1885. If you are also a gardener, you may know about A. M. Leonard and appreciate the discipline it took to leave the box unopened for several days, deferring the pleasure of handling good tools.
In the box was an asparagus weeder and a deluxe soil knife with a lifetime guarantee. Both are tools I have previously possessed and somehow managed to lose, despite the lifetime guarantee.
The asparagus weeder could be described as an ordinary weeder on steroids. Designed to go deep and dig up asparagus shoots, it is tough enough to uproot the deepest undesirable. It is also sharp enough to gouge my finger if I do not pay close attention to where my hands are when I am uprooting the undesirable. It came this time with a plastic shield over its tip. That detail says “watch out.”
I am never without an asparagus weeder. I always have two on hand. Because, despite my passion for good tools, I am often careless. Sometimes, when I have finished weeding, I toss my tool into the bucket of pulled weeds, forget to remove it and so dump it, along with the weeds, into the heap of garden trash along the side of the road waiting to be picked up by the town composters.
This past summer Kevin finally convinced me to spray bright orange paint on the handle of one of my asparagus weeders. I resisted because the tool is elegant and orange spray paint is not. Nevertheless, I agreed. I won’t, however, deface the handle of my new tool because this tactic did not save last year’s version from being lost. It is a testament to the struggles of this year that it has taken me until May to replace it.
My previous soil knife, also called a Hori Hori due to its Japanese origin, stayed in my possession for years, perhaps because it already had an orange handle. In March, when I began to clean and sharpen my tools for this season, I could not find my soil knife, anywhere. Sara had one in her bucket that I thought for a moment might be mine, but then I remembered her own exclamations of delight over the value of this tool for her vegetable garden. She knows it is hers, not mine. Gardeners can get very possessive about their tools.
I did not always grasp the importance of good tools. For years I accepted the maxim, “A poor workman blames his tools,” and assumed that if I had difficulties weeding or pruning or edging the fault was mine and not the tool’s.
One day, however, Brenda, my garden helper for many years before I had the good fortune to meet Kevin, showed up without her clippers. I gave her my pair of Felco #2s and prepared to manage with a non-descript pair I had picked up at a garage sale. After two hours, I was frustrated. I had done half as much work as Brenda, and I had not done it well. That is when it occurred to me that to give a person a second-rate tool, then blame them for doing a second-rate job, is simply a version of “blaming the victim” and a part of the oppressive social system I have been fighting all my life. If someone had told me then that “a poor workman blames his tools,” I cannot vouch for what piece of their anatomy I might have snipped off with my second-rate tool. That year I put an extra pair of Felco #2 clippers at the top of my Christmas list and dumped my garage-sale clippers in the trash.
I not only have a passion for good tools; I also have a passion for convincing others that it is worth the extra cost sometimes involved to get a good tool. Giving talks on any topic, I try to work in references to the value of good tools. When discussing pruning shrubs, for example, I shoe people my Silky Zubat pruning saw and my Felco #11 pruners. Pruning is an art but to be expert you need the right tool. Most important, you need tools that make a clean cut with relative ease so that the bark does not tear, leaving the plant susceptible to disease. Mangled shrubs hurt my heart.
When describing best practices for transplanting shrubs, I sing the praises of my “King of Spades,” a steel tool capable of cutting through roots and producing a clean and large root ball. When sharing ways to make gardening lower-maintenance, I talk about my Garden Bandit Hand Looper that can remove with one sweep a mass of the baby hairy bittercress (Cardamine hirsuta) that now infests all my gardens. And I display my asparagus weeder.
And then, of course, there is the edger.
When I first started to garden at Columbine Drive, I bought a Dutch-made wheelbarrow and a Dutch-made edger. Twenty-five years later I still have the wheelbarrow, but the edger broke apart some years ago. I searched and searched for a replacement, but each substitute fell far short of the original.
Often, when giving tours of my garden, I don’t have time to weed. I can always make time to edge, however, because I have the right edger. A well-edged garden distracts the eye away from the weeds. It offers the eye a crisp line that says to the viewer, ‘I am well-taken care of.’ This task is quick and easy with a good edger; it is more time-consuming and less successful if the edger is badly designed or dull from overuse. For years I had only badly designed edgers and hence I had badly edged gardens.
Then one spring Sara and I visited Keukenhof in Holland, the Dutch equivalent of Disney World, where tulips of every color and kind bloom non-stop for two months.
Whenever I visit a garden, I look for a working gardener and start a conversation. Sighting a gardener at Keukenhof, I noticed he was edging and with the very tool I had bought so long ago. I approached him, excited, and he kindly gave me the name of the company that made the edger. Not surprisingly, the company was Dutch. Even if I could have gotten to a garden supply store in Amsterdam, I could not have brought my edger through security nor paid the shipping costs to have one sent to Columbine Drive.
Returning home, I opened my favorite gardening magazine and lo and behold it advertised my edger as now available from a newly minted American distributor of Sneeborer tools. Sara bought me one for my birthday. I have been using it ever since.
Today I will put my new asparagus weeder in a safe spot, but the soil knife goes into the ground immediately. A long weekend without weeding has given the undesirables a head start. But it is nothing the Hori Hori, companioned by garden bandit and asparagus weeder, can’t handle.
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