In this episode, Beverly is joined by Angela Chandler of The Garden Academy. They talked about great gifts for gardeners!
[Beverly] Hi. Welcome. I’m Beverly Welch here at The Arbor Gate in Tomball, Texas.
Joined today by my dear friend, Angela Chandler of the Garden Academy. – [Angela] Good morning, Beverly.
– Good morning, Angela. It’s so great to have you here as always.
– It’s good to see you. What are we talking about today?
– Well today, we’re working on great gifts for gardeners. And of course, every gardener loves a plant.
– They do.
– And just like anybody else, there’s things that we are hesitant to spend that extra money on for ourselves. So there are some great ideas for gardeners.
– There really are and pretty much, it suits every budget, Beverly.
– It does. Of course, every gardener loves a beautiful plant. But why don’t we enhance it with garden art? Here at Arbor Gate, we love garden art. It can be the glassware, it can be the mushrooms. These are all weather resistant and good choices.
– And at the end of the Christmas season, they can go out in the garden and be enjoyed as well.
– They can. They can. And speaking of flowers and pots, we all have pots, we all have to move them around. So this is a great idea when you have the heavy pots or even just a heavy rock or something to move in the garden, are these lifters.
– They do a great job. It makes it much, much easier than people realize for two people to move a plant.
– It is. It is. And of course, humming birds are always popular but there’s a new type of feeder now called the humming bar and it’s really a lot of fun, almost like a buffet for humming birds.
– I love this idea.
– It is a great one. It is a great one. And of course, we have the essential tools in the garden that sometimes we don’t spend that extra dollar for for ourselves.
– We really should, Beverly. Good brass watering devices will literally last a lifetime. The idea that you can be able to isolate, turn your water on and off at the hose while you’re walking around the garden is really convenient for a gardener.
– It is. That way, if you’re watering and you see something you’d like to do, you don’t have to walk back to turn the water off. So it’s a really good idea to have a shutoff on every one of your hoses.
– Sure. And then you have the little fogger nozzle which is great for rooting, for seed growing, for transplants.
– They really are wonderful. They don’t disturb a seed bed and some of our winter vegetables, things like lettuce, they need to be planted very shallowly. And then, when we water them in afterwards, we can disturb the seeds and upset them from being able to germinate. This takes care of that.
– And then, I love this guy right here and he is so overlooked. It’s called a siphon. So you can literally make any solution that you want in a bucket, concentrate form, at your hose. So whenever you turn the hose on, you are feeding.
– It does. And you mix a 16 to 1 dilution and it dilutes perfectly as it goes out in the garden. You can do it while you’re hand watering but you can also do it with a sprinkler.
– It’s brilliant. I love it. And again, a brass fitting, so nothing to break.
– Brass fittings. They last a lifetime.
– And in lieu of pop ups, I love Hozons for a lot of reasons. First of all, it mixes the concentrate here. So what is ever left in your bottle goes right back in. You’re only mixing what you’re using.
– That’s right. And the thing about it is that most of us, when we want to do things like a foliar feeding, if we want to get molasses out, we want to put a volume of it out. So a pop-up sprayer is really good for individual plants that you want to work but you should really be hitting your whole garden with this and that’s the fastest way to do it.
– It’s wonderful. And then for planting. This is something that I came across. It’s a new product called THE MAXBIT. So this actually will fit this auger onto your cordless drill. This will make a planting hole for a one gallon pot. Most augers just push the soil to the side.
This literally will lift the soil up and mound it around the top of the hole. So it is a ready to use planting hole.
– What a great idea.
– Isn’t this awesome? And it also comes for a four inch pot or a bowl. It’s perfect. And then these tools are made in Germany. They’re hand forged, so they’re very long lasting. But what’s so wonderful about them is there’s the universal handle. So you can buy all types of fittings but just one handle.
– Saves space, saves time, saves money.
– And this is I think both of our favorites.
– Everybody loves this. As soon as you start using it, it becomes one of your essential tools.
– It really is. It’s called a kin hoe and originated in Korea. But you can use it as you see. I even plant one gallon plants with this.
– Yeah. You can weed, you can plant. Definitely, you can get in bulbs and four inch plants very, very quickly. Vegetable transplants, it’s just good for a quick refresh around the garden. It’s just a really good multiuse tool.
– It is. It is. And of course, knee pads.
– Knee pads. We all have to take care of our knee. That is something that gets a little uncomfortable after time. So a pair of knee pads can really do wonders. There are all kinds of knee pads that you can move around and they’re fine but this one goes with you every place you’re working in the garden.
– It does. And a great pair of gloves. I love the gloves that come up on my arm. Not just for roses but just pruning in general.
– Just pruning in general. It really does make a difference. Especially when you need to reach into a plant. You know, pom pom pruning is not to everybody’s taste. We like a more natural way and the way to do that is to selectively prune the very long branches inside a plant. Now, you can go in without getting scratched. And honestly, gardeners can never have too many pairs of gloves.
– Boy, that’s true. And we always need to know the temperature.
– We do.
– These are a good brand. They’re brass. So again, very long lasting.
– Yeah. Attractive and practical at the same time.
– Right. And then, we have some nice garden sheers. I love this scissors.
– Yeah. This is another thing that’s very practical. Quick pruning if you’re trying to take beautiful flowers inside the house. It’s just one of those things you can slip in your pocket and do multiple things around the garden.
– Very useful for those herb gardeners.
– Oh, very useful for that. Good for snipping.
– And then, you always have to have sharpeners and we don’t think about that but we’ve got to keep our tools sharp.
– Yeah. I actually keep these in my garden apron so that I can hit tools quickly when I need to as I’m working in the garden.
– Great idea.
– And so I have one in my garden bucket and one in my apron as well.
– Good job. And then of course, the books.
– Books. There are garden books out for every single interest of gardening. If you love roses, there are rose books. If you love vegetables, there are vegetable books. Bulbs, there are bulb books. And the wonderful thing about this is for instance, this one is written by two wonderful local authors, Bill Welch and Chris Wiesinger, just treasures in our horticultural community, the garden book of Houston which addresses specifically our climate, our plants, our soils, which is a good thing.
And then Carrots Love Tomatoes which is about companion planting. And gardeners have known for centuries about companion planting through things we observe. But now, science is kind of catching up with this. So it’s really good validation.
– It is good. And we were talking about this earlier. This label is invaluable.
– It is. Gardeners have always tried to find ways to label the plants that they’re going to keep more permanently in their garden and definitely, you want to have neat, attractive, easy to read labels in the edible garden for sure and it’s wonderful to have one that’s specially designed for us and will tolerate being outdoors over a long time.
– And we’re back to garden art. I love bottle trees. I’m glad to see they’ve made such a comeback. But, you know, in lieu of a basket, you could hang a lot of these gifts and do a little table top bottle tree.
– You could. It would be I think so welcome in so many ways. It’s going to brighten somebody’s Christmas day.
– So I hope these have, you know, given everybody great ideas to use but of course, the most important gift of all, if you can’t decide, is an Arbor Gate gift certificate.
– Yeah. An Arbor Gate gift certificate and a visit to Arbor Gate too and your shopping list for gardeners should be complete.
– Thank you, Angela.
