While I will always promote gleaning your gardening gear from the recycling bin or second-hand via garage sales and thrift stores, there are times when buying new is required. A lot of gardeners looking to save money have been turning to the dollar store over the past few years, especially since many chains have been …
Emboldened by a cleaver buying guide in the book, “Vietnamese Home Cooking,” I set off to Chinatown on Friday afternoon with the intent to buy a cleaver. As a teenager, I worked a handful of sweaty kitchen jobs where I was taught proper knife skills and somehow, through the experience of chopping a hell of …
Home Ground: Sanctuary in the City by Dan Pearson $19.79 US: You can’t go wrong with a book, and I think that the Holidays are a great opportunity to gift books that friends might not buy for themselves otherwise. I found this beautiful, diary-like garden book at a local cookbook shop and was instantly drawn …
The other day, while shopping in the plant section of the Montreal Botanical Garden’s gift store I came upon a long pair of forceps that a staff member must have forgotten, left sitting among the cacti. In that moment it occurred to me, aha, yes, THIS is just the tool I need to help wrangle …
Fiskars, makers of the famous orange-handled crafting scissors and assorted gardening pruners, among other things (turns out they make boats too. o-kay), recently sent me their Power Stroke Telescoping Pruning Stik 12-Foot Tree Pruner as a solution to a problem we’ve been having at the community garden with weed trees taking over and throwing shade …
You all made some great guesses and invented some interesting products while trying to guess what was underneath the many miles of bubble wrap. I’ll take the seed bomb launcher, the combine for a container wheat field, or the automatic garden weeder, please. One guess was really close, but went a bit too far. (Daniel: …
My favourite tool bag at my community garden plot, October 4, 2007. I forgot to bring a harvest bag and had to cram everything into the top of the tool bag. I’m currently harvesting lots of dandelion greens for boiling and herbs for drying but the weather has been so mild even the summer crops …
It’s really far too early to start getting supplies or thinking about tomatoes but with the weather outside being in the minus kill-me-nows I can’t help but start peaking at the Lee Valley catalog. I’ve already decided that I’m going to sacrifice a couple of my tomato plants to “research” and give red plastic mulch …