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Gardening with Galligan: Staples, trugs and wheelbarrows

CAROL GALLIGAN PHOTO A spring bouquet brightening a room.
CAROL GALLIGAN PHOTO A spring bouquet brightening a room.

Last week we reviewed the first five important things you must own. Here are the next five and maybe more.

Let’s begin with a kneeling pad. There is an underlying principle here that’s important to keep in mind.

The more comfortable you make the task, the more likely you are to do it — when you would rather put it off or shirk it entirely. That’s the same strategy involved in keeping your work area neat and consequently approachable; gardening tasks are often less than pleasant, especially for those advanced in age. But we can keep our noses to the grindstone by making the unpleasant as pleasant as possible.

The next thing you should purchase is fishing line; it’s far superior to that green plastic stuff and more attractive as well. It’s a little difficult to deal with but it’s worth the trouble and virtually indestructible.

Use it for hanging art on your garden fences or trees and for making trellises for climbing vines. If it’s strong enough to catch a tuna, it won’t be daunted by morning glories. A good companion for the fishing line is a package of garden staples. These look like extremely large — 5 or 6 inches — hairpins, as in days of yore.

They serve many functions, such as convincing trailing plants to put down additional root systems. If you have ivy growing and, given the degree of shade I have, I have it in many places, you can take a staple, find a good thick stem and use the staple to drive that stem right against the soil. It will take root.

Do you have a trug? Most gardeners do, but if not, you should acquire one. Trugs are a kind of garden basket that was known to gardeners as long ago as the 1500s. At the London Great Exhibition of 1851, Queen Victoria actually purchased several. (She probably paid for them with the cash she didn’t give to assist the victims of the Irish famine, but that’s another story.)

They are lengthy and have an arching handle in the center; their purpose is to hold cut flowers as the gardener gathers them, which is why they are shaped the way they are. Originally, trugs were made from willow and chestnut trees, abundant in Sussex where they probably originated. Nowadays, they come in all kinds of materials and colors.

Don’t forget a wheelbarrow. I bought a new one two years ago, bright red and very cheerful (as in strategy above) and use it extensively; I find the best way to fertilize is to put the big bags, the 30 or 40 pounders, in the wheelbarrow and push it from bed to bed, using a garden saucer to scatter the grains of fertilizer.

This is not how books tell you to do it but my experience is that it works perfectly well. Books tell you to “scratch it in.” It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to visualize the position you would have to be in in order to “scratch it in.” Not one of my favorites.

Next week, let’s talk about winterkill — what did well and what didn’t. By then we should be able to count our losses.

Tip of the week: If you cut forsythia now and bring it inside, it will bloom, probably in about 10 days. I’ve been doing this for the past four weeks, and the large vase of it on my dining room table  truly cheers up the gray rainy days of April.