Old Tools

Inherited Tools

I inherited some old tools this week.  They are a varied mix of both woodworking tools and gardening implements.  Although none of them have been forged from blacksmiths in the Victorian era, they do have a bit of age to them, and a feeling of hand crafted quality with not a hint of plastic moulding anywhere.  

My favourite piece other than the fork and sickle is a complete wooden case holding everything I might need to produce quality pieces of wooden furniture, although all I have used so far are the two saws for cutting our driftwood into manageable pieces to fit in the fire.  A joy to use they are too, owned by a joiner they were professionally sharpened and even though I blunted them quickly they re sharpen beautifully.  The handles on the tools have the maker’s marks and also the stamp of the person I inherited the pieces from.

The fork, spade, half moon hoes and rakes all look the same as their modern counterparts. When you look into the history of some of the most common garden tools we use today, we find not much has changed in hundreds of years. What has changed, though, is the value placed on those implements. The convenience of mass produced tools wasn’t even considered a few generations ago so a lot of tools were hand made locally. Because of their high value, each family's collection of garden tools was highly prized by their owners. Common garden tools were extremely valuable in planting and cultivating the beds and fields that fed whole families. Peoples' livelihoods directly depended on their garden tools. I get the feeling that the tools I have inherited were very highly valued and well looked after.

A Bit of History

Some of the oldest garden tools in the world date back many thousands of years. The first woody plant intentionally pruned by humans is believed to have been the grapevine in Armenia around 6000 B.C. A bronze spade closely resembling more modern ones was used by the Chinese as early as 1100 B.C. The oldest tool though is said to be the hammer, no doubt it was shaped like a rock.

The Romans established the pattern for the spades and shovels we use today when they harnessed the technology of the forge to heat iron to its malleable point. In the mid-14th century, iron smelting made it possible to create lighter, more precisely-shaped tools. Then came the industrial revolution, bringing steel and cast alloys out of the fire and leading to the manufacture of tools that were lighter, finer and far more durable.

Things didn’t stay as they were though and tools such as hand trowels changed the direction of their tines from sideways to flat.  The 1950's saw the introduction of even more lightweight aluminium tools. Before the late 1880s, aluminium was exceedingly difficult to extract from its various ores. This made pure aluminium more valuable than gold. Napoleon III of France is reputed to have given a banquet where the most honoured guests were given aluminium utensils, while the others made do with gold.

Grass Clippers

One of the main tools before the push lawnmower was invented in 1827 by Edwin Buddin, were large grass clippers that resembles sheep shearing clippers.  We had to wait until 1920 for the petrol mower and the rotary one didn’t materialise until 1952.

Old Tools

I was looking through the old gardening tools virtual museum to see if there were any gardening tools that haven’t stood the test of time and been discontinued throughout the years, and there are a lot. The aforementioned grass clippers have morphed into hand shears and the wide choice of weeding tools seems to have dwindled also.  I haven’t seen a gouge for extracting asparagus or a v shaped tool for pulling up daisies for years and have never seen a fern trowel, but they were very popular at one time.

Tools that I found highly entertaining in the collection were the Acme Powder Blower by the Acme Chemical Co made in the 1950’s, ideal for blowing DDT on your roses.  Iron boots that weighed a tonne, bird scarers that were similar to football rattles so you had to run around the garden twizelling it over your head, glass tubes with cork seals for putting plant labels in as indelible ink wasn’t available, bellows for dusting, large measuring devices for getting topiary shrubs the same size and the cucumber straightening jars.

                             The Little Wonder hand operated hedge cutter. Pic courtesy of Old Garden Tools.co.uk

Little Wonder

My favourite though is the ‘Little Wonder’ hedge clippers, introduced in 1939. It cost a staggering 6 pounds and six shillings. It was the most evocative garden tool and also one of the most useless and unreliable by all accounts. The buyer would have been very well off and certainly have 2 or more gardening staff as the steel contraption has three handles along its 5 foot length, which all needed holding to lift it into place. The operating mechanism is very similar to the cog driven hand drill, one of which I have also just inherited.

Something else that I would like to add to my growing collection of old quality tools would be the antler handle hand pruning saw produced in the late 1800’s. It is such a tactile instrument that I’m sure everything that needed pruning in the garden would get the attention it deserved. Check out more old tools for sale here

Mushroom Foraging and Succesful Sunflowers

 Gareths mushrooms fried up on hot buttered toast...Yum

Foraging in the Woodlands

Gareth Austin, our own Radio Foyle gardener, community horticultural activist and Buncrana Tidy Towns Gardening competition judge, set up a mushroom forage around Prehen House in Derry recently. With the help of fungi expert Colin Peck, the small group gathered a wide range of fungi from the bold and beautiful to the strange and bizarre into baskets ready to be identified to see if they were edible varieties. 

The group had to be limited in numbers as their woodland autumn harvest was cooked up at the end of the day then spread on delicious hot buttered toast.  The positive comments and popularity of the day prompted Gareth to set another day to cater for the demand at the end  October, check out Gareth’s website   or facebook page to see if there are any more ‘Gatherings ‘ before the end of the season.  It’s a wonderful thing to have the knowledge and confidence to safely eat what comes out of the woods and it is recommended that you only eat mushrooms that you know are not poisonous. Having an expert team on hand as this course does save you any mishaps and visits to the poisons unit at the hospital. 

How to avoid mushroom poisoning

Shelley Evans' guidelines in "Guides for the Amateur Mycologist “have been helpful with this list.

1. Unfamiliar Species: Check and re-check your identification, especially looking out for a similar poisonous species. If still in doubt, ask an expert or throw it away.

2. Examine each specimen. Always check each specimen in case a different species has got in amongst your collection of edible ones.

3. Keep your collections separate. Do not mix edible and non-edible species in a collecting tray if you are collecting for the pot. It is a good idea if collecting for the pot to only collect edible species and not other species for identification purposes.

4. Check the spore print. A simple operation, leaving a cap on some paper and covering for an hour or so. This will help check your identification.

5. Do not eat raw wild fungi. Some wild fungi are poisonous if eaten raw, e.g. Wood Blewit, Lepista nuda, the Blusher, Amanita rubescens or species of Helvella. Always cook your collections.

6. Retain an uncooked specimen. This is a very sensible idea. Keep one example of what you have eaten in the fridge. In case, you do poison yourself, this will help others identify what you have eaten and therefore know how to treat you. Different species contain different toxins, therefore treatments will vary.

7. Only eat good specimens. Many poisoning cases occur when edible species are eaten in poor condition. Only eat good specimens!

8. Keep your collections in the fridge. This keeps your specimens in good condition.

9. Experimenting. If experimenting and eating a type for the first time, only eat a small amount. Different people react to fungi in different ways and it is safer to test your own body out gently!

10. Alcohol. Avoid drinking alcohol with species you haven't eaten before and with certain species, e.g. the Common Ink Cap, Coprinus atramentarius.

11. Fear. Do not feed wild mushrooms to people who don't want to eat them. Fear can make people sick.

12. Susceptible people. Do not serve wild fungi to young children, old or sick people. Their resistance may be lower.

13. Greed. Do not large quantities of wild mushrooms in one sitting. This alone can make you sick.

Remember : There’s not substitute for an expert by your side.

Successful Sunflowers

We had a very successful sunflower harvest this year.  They weren’t competition winners by any stretch of the imagination, only growing to about seven feet. But that means that the heads are full of plump seeds. The current world record for the tallest sunflower is just a touch over 26 feet, held by a bloke in Germany. Because our plants were quite compact and big headed we didn’t need to stake them and stood up on their own for most of the summer.  They have drooped a bit in their old age, but that’s to be expected when the heads mature and get top heavy.  

Get them first

We have grown a fair amount of sunflowers in the past and it’s usually the birds or fungal disease that gets to the seeds before we do so this year I was ahead of the game and cut them down just as the yellow petals dropped off.  Text books tell us to wait until the rear of the flower turns brown before chopping the stems off to about a foot in length, I find this is beyond the point of no return  as they just rot.  Mine are still green and lush so hanging them in a warm dry place should do the trick.  Another suggestion is leaving the flower heads on the plants and covering them with a paper bag to protect them from the birds. The recommendations are to change the bag ‘should it rain and get the bags wet’.  As I don’t want to change the bags 3 times I day, I’ll give that method a miss thank you.

The seeds are remarkably plump and well formed so I think this year will be a successful crop.  It’d be nice to have grown enough to produce my own sunflower oil but I’ll settle for a few seeds scattered on my porridge in the mornings.

National Conifer Week 2012

Take your eye off of them for just a season and specialist equipment might be needed.

I answered a classified ad on a local buy and sell website this week.  The ad was in the FREE section, and the person was looking for someone with a chainsaw to take away some trees.  It was worded as ‘FREE FIREWOOD’, which sounded good to me as we have a fire to keep going and my mother in law has two wood burning stoves to feed throughout the winter, so the more wood we can get the better.  As the garden was very local I took no time in getting there, with freebies it’s the early bird...

I needn’t have rushed though as the wood in question was on loads of multi stemmed conifers, still uncut and reaching 30-40 feet into the air.  I only have a small chainsaw and don’t have a trailer let alone a towbar on the car, so felt totally inadequate for the job.  I like to keep things tidy so even if I wasn’t getting paid I would still like to leave the place tidier than when I found it, so would feel compelled to take away all of the greenery, and there was plenty of it! I would have needed about twenty skips to clear the soft branches that would be no good for burning, even before I got to the trunks.  I asked the woman how the garden came to be so overgrown and she told me that she had planted all of the conifers (about 30 of them) in her garden and took her eye off them for a few years. This was the result.  The lady took me to a place where a hidden arbour was, totally covered by conifers, her patio, again swamped by them. I can only guess the damage they have done to the walls and driveway.  

This might be a bit of an extreme but I do know of a lot of people who are haunted by leylandii cutting every year, take your eye off them for a season and you have a mammoth clearing task on your hands. 

Garden retailers are not giving up though and still see the conifer as a must have for pots and containers at least, even if we are not prepared to let them lose in the garden.

Growing Conifers in the garden

To boost conifer sales, retailers have been getting involved in the National Conifer Week. The objective of this event, organised by the British Conifer Group (BCG) and supported by the Horticultural Trades Association (HTA), is to provide support for retailers to encourage their customers to see the many benefits of growing conifers in the garden.

Nearly a third of us have a conifer in the garden according to a recent survey.  It’s be interesting to see the amount of people who wished they never planted them in the garden in the first place as some types can grow up to 3 feet each growing season.

New Varieties to the market:

Even if conifers are advertised as being ‘dwarf’, keep a close eye on them!

Chamaecyparis lawsoniana ‘Pearly Swirls’,

Juniperus squamata ‘Hulsdonk Yellow’

and Juniperus squamata ‘Tropical Blue’.

These three offer vibrant colour to a garden in blues, greens, golds, greys and bronzes to brighten up those autumn and winter months.

Here are a few old favourites, ideal for the small garden

• Taxus baccata ‘Standishii’,

• Chamaecyparis obtusa ‘Nana Gracilis’

• Picea glauca ‘J.W. Daisy’s White’

• Picea pungens ‘Globosa’

• Chamaecyparis lawsoniana ‘Minima Aurea’.

Irish Stockist

Future Forests based in County Cork have a wide choice of both potted and bare rooted conifers. Bare rooted conifers will be in stock from November.

• 3'x3'      Cryptomeria jap. 'Tilford Gold' . Dwarf bush, bronzed in winter
• 8'x3'      Thuja occ 'Brabant'. Neat cone, bronze in winter
• 5'x3'      Chamaecyparis laws. 'Yvonne'. Yellow /gold, cone shaped
• 2'x2'      Chamaecyparis obtusa Nana Gracilis. Very dwarf, green shell shaped foliage
• 8'x6'      Korean Fir (Abies koreana). Good shape and doesn't get too tall                              

      Purple cones on even a young tree

• 5'x3'      Juniper communis Common Juniper. Strong bush, prickly, berries for gin                                              Native, likes lime
• 3'x3'      Juniper squa. 'Holger'. New shoots tipped creamy yellow

If you can’t find what you are looking for locally then Future Forests is also offering any 5 Junipers in 9cm for 15 euro.

New Book

The RHS has recently published a giant, two-volume Encyclopedia of Conifers, co-authored by Derek Spicer, which covers all of the world’s 615 conifer species plus 8,000 cultivars. An ideal book for the conifer collector, the encyclopedia features over 5,000 fantastic photos and provides an essential reference tool.

Be Warned

As part of the ‘Plan it, Plant it this Autumn' campaign, conifers can offer a way to add something new and interesting to the garden at has become a quieter time in the trade. Being hardy, easy to care for and long-lasting, conifers are the ideal choice for the marginal gardener looking for a low maintenance but high impact plant.

Be warned though, what looks cute and unobtrusive now could reach 40’ in height and have a spread of more than 25 feet!