We have been spending a lot of time trying to sort out everything that we use in
gardens before the growing season really starts. And there is a lot of stuff, probably too much,
and that has been bothering me a bit. In a previous video I have already talked
about the insane number of seed packages that I have collected, a wide range of different types
of propagation equipment we use, the different growing medium that we fill them with, the
diversity of concentrated fertility and amendments we used to help the plants grow better in some of
the gardens, and the large sheets of material we use to cover the ground and protect the crops.
We don’t need all of it to grow vegetables of course, and I know that it is possible to grow
vegetables with a lot less, but a big part of this RED Gardens Project is to try out many
different things, and each of the growing spaces relies on a different range of stuff to propagate,
feed and protect the vegetable plants. There are also a lot of other things that
I have bought or acquired over the years to help grow more vegetables in these gardens,
and a lot of stuff that I build and repurposed to make some of the tasks easier and more successful.
And for this second video, I though that it would be interesting to focus mainly on the
range of tools and equipment that we rely on in the gardens, or have been experimenting with,
as a significant part of all of the stuff that we still need to sort, store and care for.
There are of course a typical range of tools that many growers and gardeners in
this part of the world have to help manage their growing spaces, including standard
garden forks, spades, shovels, and rakes. And I have a collection of all of these,
some of which I have bought, and others have been passed on to me,
as these tools tend to last a long time, often longer than someone’s enthusiasm for growing.
It is generally only the wooden handles that needs care and attention, and I have replaced
a lot of handles, including the ones that I have broken myself, and I still have some tools under
the bench in the shed that need new handles. We also use other specialty rakes that are really
useful for levelling beds, and for clearing up the remains of plants on the soil surface.
We have narrow shovels for digging, and a wider shovel for moving lots of lighter bulk material,
we have oscillating hoes and a few other types of hoes and cultivators for clearing the surface of
the beds of weeds, there’s also larger digging tools, heavier picks for clearing rough ground,
and a fork that is beautifully designed for gathering hay that I also use for tuning compost.
There are lots of other tools that are designed for a particular task that I would like to try,
though in many cases this task can still be done with other more common tools that I already have,
though perhaps not as easily or elegantly. The most recent addition to this collection
of larger tools is a broadfork, which is also probably the most expensive tool I have bought.
In the gardens where we still dig or cultivate the soil we have usually used
a long handled garden fork, and occasionally a spade, to turn and gently till the soil.
But it is much faster and easier to use a broadfork like this to loosen
and gently cultivate the beds in some of the gardens, though I don’t know
what difference this will make to the soil and the crops in the long term.
We tend to focus on the larger and longer handled tools in the gardens, but we still have
some smaller hand tools including old trowels and a dibber for making transplanting holes,
and think a few other small hand tools could make some jobs in the gardens easier.
Of course knives are essential, and I always have a general purpose knife on my belt when
in the gardens, though with all the rough stuff I do with it, I am not great at keeping it sharp.
There are a few small kitchen knives that we have found in the community
compost system which we keep around as they are useful for some harvesting and weeding.
We also have pruners or secateurs which are good for harvesting squash or aubergines,
and larger loppers or pruners which are useful for chopping up tough brassica stems in the compost.
I also use a scythe quite a bit for clearing areas in the surrounding landscape,
especially for collecting long grasses, nettles and other biomass for sheet composting, and I use
a sickle which I find useful for cutting other fertility accumulating plants such as comfrey.
And we have a wide range of different sharpening stones, files and a peening hammer and anvil
for keeping all of these sharp, which is an essential task, and always makes things easier.
We also keep some general purpose tools in the shed for use in the gardens,
including a claw hammer, a mallet, fencing pliers, hand saws, and a hatchet.
We also have measuring tapes and measuring sticks which are useful to maintain an acceptable level
of accuracy in the bed layout and plant spacing, which is an important part of the trials we do.
Most of these smaller and larger tools we use as they are, but some of them have been
adapted over the years, including putting longer handles on spades and garden forks,
and sharpening the spades, which I have found makes them a lot more useful.
I have also been making a few simple wire weeders, out of thick wire and old bucket handles,
and have a collection of other bucket handles that I am keeping for making the next ones.
All of these tools need to be stored in a way that makes them easy to access and
close to the growing spaces, but also kept out of the way, and kept dry and secure,
which is something I’m still working on. This is a bit tricky, as we have two main growing
spaces that are separated by more than 100m, within a shared space that is publicly accessible.
We don’t use rototillers or other machines in the gardens, relying on only hand tools to
cultivate the soil, haul material and turn the compost, all of which can take a lot of work.
I think this is interesting example of the different biases or approaches that
we can have around managing our gardens, accepting some things and avoiding others.
For example it’s perhaps strange for some people that I am willing to import a lot of fertility,
but also hesitant to use fossil fuel or machines to make a lot of the tasks easier in the gardens.
Part of this is to show that you can grow food without relying on machines,
using a few simple tools and a bit of effort, but I still rely on energy and machines for
other processes in supporting the gardens, which is perhaps a bit of a contradiction.
I have a flame weeder that runs off of a propane tank, that we use for creating sterile seed beds
in some of the gardens, and that I also use for other purposes in and around the gardens.
I regularly use a communal lawnmower to cut the grass around the gardens, both to keep the area
tidy and under control, and to collect biomass for composting and mulching in the gardens.
And I recently invested in a big chipper as a useful piece of machinery for processing the
increasing amounts of woody material that can be gathered from the surrounding landscape,
for adding to the compost and for use for mulching some of the garden beds and paths with woodchip.
But I haven’t really used it that much, partially because I haven’t been able to
store it close to gardens, which makes it less useful and convenient, but I hope to
resolve that storage and access issue soon. I also make use of a soil warming cable for
helping to propagate plants for the gardens in the spring, protecting the tender plants from frost,
and helping them grow quickly when the weather is still cold.
And I have quite a few grow lights that we use in our already warm house for starting seedlings.
This propagation equipment relies on electricity at the house,
and we still don’t have an electricity supply up at the gardens yet, and if we did, I’d probably
acquire some other tools and equipment that would make some of the processes easier in the gardens.
Tools are obviously important in the gardens, but I also think that containers
are essential in so many different ways. I use to rely mainly on repurposed containers,
especially a load of buckets I got from a food factory quite a few years ago,
which were great for many tasks in the gardens, including harvesting,
washing, hauling compost, and general storage. But, over the years most of them have become too
brittle and ended up cracking or breaking, probably faster than they would have if I
had stored them out of the sun more often. With only a few left in usable condition,
I have decided to invest in totes or larger containers, and in many ways these are easier
and more useful, as they can hold a larger volume, and I can purchase the sizes that suit the need.
We use some to store the various types of fertility that I buy in bulk quantities,
which keep these supplies dry and out of the way, but I also rely on smaller
repurposed containers for the convenience of spreading these amendments in the gardens.
We use others totes for hauling compost and spreading it on the garden beds,
though we generally don’t fill them completely if the material is too met and becomes too heavy.
And we use other, more rigid totes for harvesting, and carrying all the vegetables back to the house
or to stock the honesty fridge, and I try to keep these ones clean and food safe.
I also bought containers for storing small items that are useful to keep close to the gardens.
All these totes and containers are an investment, something I probably
wouldn’t have made a few years ago, but I do think that they are really useful,
especially with all the extra stuff I need to store these days.
Thankfully the ones that aren’t in use can be stacked together to take up less
space when storing them, and I am trying to keep these plastic containers out of
the sun to prolong their life, though I have found they are not indestructible.
The other big investment in plastic stuff that I have made in the past
few years has been watering systems. I use to rely entirely on hand watering,
even in the polytunnel, filling large repurposed tubs with water and using two
watering cans to water all of the plants. This was a lot of work, especially in the
dry periods that we can get in the summer, and installing other watering systems has
possibly been the biggest time saving out of anything I have changed in the gardens.
We still use the large tubs and watering cans for occasional watering and liquid feeding,
and have them located for use in the three polytunnels, and we rely on and conventional
hose and sprayers occasionally. But I have installed drip line pipes
on all of the beds in the three polytunnels, and have an additional sprinkler system in two
of the polytunnels, and plan to install sprinklers in the third polytunnel.
I find the combination of these two systems to be quite useful, but at different times of the year,
with the sprinklers watering the full surface which is ideal when
the polytunnels are filled with salad crops. And the drip lines are more useful when the
tunnels are full of larger plants like tomatoes and beans, especially as they
can get in the way of the sprinklers, and seem to do better when their leaves don’t get wet.
For the outside gardens we have been relying on springers set into a length of wood for the past
few summers, that we can move around the gardens, watering section after section of all the gardens,
to keep the plants happy during dry periods. But, I have decided to set up drip lines on
most of the outside gardens this year, which isn’t really necessary here in Ireland,
as we generally get a decent amount of rain for most of the season.
But when it is dry, which seems to be happening more frequently, needing to regularly move the
sprinklers during the day is an additional effort and time constraint, with a fair
amount of the water being lost to evaporation. So, the plan to set up drip lines for watering
at night with a timer is an investment, and will require buying a fair amount of stuff,
but there should be a lot less water loss, and it will save a lot of time and reduce
constraints at really busy times of the year. I am also going to set up dripper systems for
the huge number of large grow bags that are part of the different trials we are continuing with,
which will save a lot of time watering, keep the plants a lot happier, and remove
a problematic variable in the trials, that has been an issue this past year.
All of this takes pipes, connectors, valves, hoses, adaptors, drippers,
sprinklers and special tools, which is a lot of stuff to buy, assemble, manage and take
care of in the gardens, and I need to store the leftover lengths of pipes and surplus fittings.
The other recent investment that I made is for hanging the climbing plants,
especially for tomatoes and cucumbers, but also the aubergines or eggplants, peppers
and other taller plants, in the polytunnels. I use to rely on recycled twine from straw bales,
or plastic builders twine, but have shifted to buying in big rolls of biodegradable
twine that is made for this purpose. I also have invested in tomahooks,
or bent pieces of wire that the twine can be wound around, which are useful when dropping tomato and
cucumber plants, and extending the twine so that these vining plants can continue to grow.
Using these hooks is a lot easier and faster than tying the twine, and more secure, but it does
leave me with a big pile of the tomahooks to store when not in use over the winter, and these things
can be a hassle to manage when they get tangled. This system works well with specially made clips,
that easily clip around the stem of the plant, and hold onto the twine.
These clips will apparently decompose in the compost,
which can make the whole process of clearing the polytunnel at the end of the season a lot faster.
But we have been removing and reusing many of the clips, to avoid waste, and save a bit of money,
but then they are another thing that we need to store over winter and have
available for easy use during the growing season.
All of this stuff is useful for growing vegetables and managing
gardens, and in many ways is focused on saving time and growing better crops.
I could definitely grow food with a lot less of this stuff, but saving time and
finding efficient and effective ways of doing all the tasks in the gardens is important,
especially for commercial growers, or for those of us with less time to spend in the gardens.
But within the context of this RED Gardens Project, I think it is useful to try out a lot
of different things, and saving time means we have more time for other explorations.
And, as part of this project, I rely on another set of tools and equipment,
that I probably wouldn’t use if I was just growing food for myself.
We have several scales for weighting everything that we harvest,
which is a key way to be able to compare the different growing systems or fertility options,
and I recently bought a couple of larger scales to move away from the cheaper and
less reliable kitchen scales and hanging luggage scales that I relied on for years.
And I have a few other pieces of equipment that can be useful for analysis,
including thermometers, refractometers, and moisture meters, though all of these
could be upgraded and made more use of. We also rely on our smartphones a lot to
access the large spreadsheets for each garden that serve as planting plans,
task lists and a place to record all the harvests and make notes of any observations.
I also use my phone for recording all of the clips for use in these videos, and for recording myself,
and have bought several mics to improve the sound quality and of course need a tripods,
as well as my laptop, hard drives and all of the software to edit and store all of the videos.
I am thinking of investing in lights and reflectors and another tripod for different
situations, and possibly another camera changeable lenses to take better footage
of the gardens, but I think that might be beyond the project’s budget at the moment.
These are all part of the ever expanding collection of tools and equipment that I
have bought or acquired for use in the gardens, and most of them are useful in different ways,
and some of them are essential, but many of them are potentially interchangeable,
with a lot of overlap in function and use. And looking at it all, together with all of
the other material that I talked about in the previous video, and all of the
stuff that I make assemble and repurpose, which will be the topic of the next video,
it is a lot of stuff to buy, look after and store. And sometimes I feel more like a consumer and
user of food growing stuff, than simply a grower of food.