Monthly Archives: March 2013

Spend a few years gardening, and you’ll note how necessary metal wire is for most applications. If you want something to last more than a year or so, you’ll need wire. The garden twine used to tie back roses or tie up tomatoes might last a year under most weather conditions. I’ve known people, including my mother, to use flexible plastic oxygen tubing for tying up climbing roses to a trellis, but the Texas sun leaves that yellowed and brittle within a year. Even with UV inhibitors incorporated into the mix, most plastics only survive for a few years, so even big pots eventually go brittle as their plasticizers outgas and sunlight breaks down the resin’s chemical bonds. If most house and car paint starts to powder and fade within five years, what chance does a Zip-tie have?

(When I was still in high school, my little brother had a 1973 Chevy Vega as his first car. My father purchased it from a friend for $25, after the car responded to a whole new engine rebuild by dropping the transmission, and that friend’s son had painted the beast blue with white racing stripes. He did a great job with the masking, but he didn’t seal the paint, and two or three Dallas summers left it a bit, erm, permeable. In fact, every rainstorm left a line of blue milky water running down the street from where the Vega sat, and trying to wash that beast was an exercise in Sissyphean futility. Even so, that beat the experience we both grew up with further north, where the sun was less intense but road salt during the winters ate out the body panels and left monstrous gaping holes in the floorboards. That Vega finally died not from the paint job, but from scratches in the paint after my brother moved to Wisconsin, and it rusted to pieces within a year of its getting there.)

Of course, wire isn’t a perfect replacement for plastic. Metal fatigue. Excellent transmission of heat and/or electricity. A tensile strength much higher than that of flesh. And, of course, when dealing with puncture wounds caused by a piece of rose tying wire or the wire often used to tie off bales of long-fiber sphagnum moss, there’s always the fun to be had from tasty, tasty tetanus. I mean, why let a little rictus sardonicus get in the way of horticultural glory? Just walk it off.

Seriously, considering all of the sharp and flexible items found in gardening areas, I’m amazed that half of my blood isn’t tetanus booster by now. Consider old rusty nails sticking out of old fencing. More nails dropped to the ground during house construction and forgotten. Insulation staples and brads dropped under the same circumstances. I won’t even start with the amount of ferrous and oxidized treasure tossed into fill dirt used for raised beds or yard grading, all loaded with bacteria left over from the days when oxygen was a deadly waste product. In a lot of those cases, removing the nightmare entirely may be impossible, so you spend your time cutting, filing, and hammering until the obstacle is no longer a threat to children or pets.

This is why every gardening toolkit needs a set of pliers and trimmers. A Leatherman at your side at all times is great, and I implore everyone looking at a cheap knockoff to consider that you get your money’s worth, but sometimes it’s not enough. Hence, alongside mine and my trusty Swiss Army Explorer knife, I recommend getting a set of specialized pliers for those special jobs. They’re usually not expensive (I bought the set of grey-handled long-reach pliers for $20 US), and the first time you need to twist wire, open up split rings, or cut something flush with a wall in a space a hacksaw can’t reach, you’ll thank yourself for snagging the set.

More to come…

Anyone doing so much as basic gardening needs a cutting edge sooner or later. Sure, you can pluck roses by hand, but at the risk of either tearing up your hand or tearing up the plant. Everyone has a story about a beloved plant that was either ripped up or ripped out of the ground because the plant’s bond to a dead leaf was stronger than its bond to the earth. When working with many carnivorous plants, a sharp edge is essential, as both Nepenthes tendrils and Sarracenia leaves are tougher than comparable hemp rope. If you think I’m kidding, go ahead and take off those dead leaves by hand. I’ll be over here, laughing.

The problem with unorthodox projects is that sometimes unorthodox tools are needed, and that particularly applies to cutting implements. A good pair of scissors or secateurs gets the job done 99 times out of a hundred. It’s the odd circumstance, though, that requires a bit of variety, which is why I have several additions in the basic toolbag.

The pair of hand clippers in the center is self-evident, although these see regular use because they’re small enough to fit into a pocket. Continue to use big scissors or clippers, to be sure, but don’t be afraid to get a small pair like these, with spring action so they open when you release pressure on them, for the really small jobs.

Now, the blades on the left are watch knives, designed to be used by jewelers for opening watch backs. The Czarina uses these constantly for watch battery replacement, as they have one side that’s beveled and the other is perfectly flat, with a good stainless steel blade that’s easily resharpened. While they’re best for circumstances where you need to pry while cutting, thus immediately making them much safer than your pair of garden scissors, that flat side means that they’re also very handy for prying up glue, epoxy, silicone sealer, or just about anything on an impermeable surface that needs to be removed with a minimum of damage to that surface. Just don’t use them for opening paint cans, and they’ll last forever.

Over on the right are the real specialist tools. Both of these are budding knives, used for T-bud grafting buds and twigs to parent trees. The bottom of the blade cuts through bark in order to start the graft, while the flange on the top allows you to pull up the bark and the cambium, very gently, to slip in the graft material before tying or taping it down. The jackknife version is one manufactured by Victorinox, the Swiss Army knife manufacturers, as a budding and garden knife, and is still available at a reasonable price. The one on the far right was a surprise discovery at an estate sale, with a rosewood handle, that suggests the owner was using it for elaborate grafting experiments. Either way, they’ve been getting a bit of a workout on my grapefruit tree, and should last for decades even with that.

As mentioned before, more to come…

Over the last weekend, I spent a very productive evening trimming back and wiring yearling Capsicum peppers for bonsai. In the process, I went digging through the big toolbag I use for holding my gardening tools and realized “You know, if someone didn’t know me, they’d have all sorts of suspicions about what I planned to do with the stuff in here. Hell, they’d have those suspicions if they did know me.” Ten years of serious horticulture, combined with a packrat mindset for tools that comes from my father’s side of the family, and most of the tools in my collection would make for props in one hell of a PBS series.

It’s worse when I bring these out at plant shows, ostensibly to pluck a dead leaf from a terrarium arrangement or prune back a recalcitrant weed that escaped notice until right then. Between the tools themselves and the heavy bag I use to haul them around, I have to explain that no, I’m not doing Harry Tuttle cosplay. When your father is an engineer, it comes with the territory.

With that in mind, it occurred to me after talking with friends that some of these tools, handmade and otherwise, might be handy to other horticulturalists as well. If it works, feel free to track down your own, or make your own, for that matter. Half of the fun is the sharing.

The first unorthodox tool is a bit too large to fit into the bag, but it’s a lifesaver for trimming plants in pots, arranging miniature gardens, or otherwise handling containers that need to spin a bit. Professional bonsai growers use turntables made specifically for the purpose, and there’s nothing wrong with these in the slightest. However, when working with smaller arrangements, I needed something with that flexibility, but lightweight enough to be carried around easily, and with a storage space underneath. Some have these, but the price is a bit iffy.

Thankfully, the detritus from the dotcom era left very affordable and usable alternatives. Every morning when I look at the flatscreen monitor on my work computer, I note that while it’s over six years old, it’s still better than the CRT monstrosity I used to have. Back when cathode ray tubes were the only options for computer monitors, the more showy had their beige monitors and their beige desktops accented with equally beige monitor stands, and those stands were designed to handle a lot more weight than is needed today. Hence, they show up in charity shops on a regular basis, and they’re perfect for miniature garden work. Adjust the wingnut to the proper tension, cover the assemblage with a waterproof cover, set your pot in the center, and spin away. Even better, if it wears out, replacement parts are easy to obtain, and you can even touch it up with a touch of paint to get rid of that Nineties-era beige and make it easier to wipe off after a repotting session.

And that’s the start of it. Keep checking back for more.