In spite of the weather prognosticators calling for winter weather this coming Tuesday, I broke ground in my garden today. Well, sort of. Because the shovel handle was broken, the rake handle was broken, I couldn’t find a hand spade, and I refused to buy new stuff. I called to mind one of my favorite old propaganda posters of yesteryear:
I decided it was time to take the bull by the horns and replace the broken handles. How hard can it be?
I used a pry bar and a hammer to remove the two small nails holding the handle into the shovel ‘head’. Then I used a properly sized wrench in an entirely improper manner to back the broken wood out of the head of the shovel.
I followed a similar method with the leaf rake, but it was more challenging because no one ever imagined that someone might want to replace the handle. Thus, the only way to get the broken wood out of the ‘head’ of the rake was with a drill and a spade bit.
Battle is half won! A trip to Carson’s for new handles, a short chat about the weather with the overalled owner as we stood in the aisle between the poultry feed and the deli, and we’re off! (I’d already been in the store twice before this morning, once for feed and once for broccoli plants. Sometime I wonder how scatterbrained they think I am.)
The handles were astonishingly easy to install. Place in the ‘shaft’, upend and have your husband pound repeatedly on the ground while complaining it is hurting his hands, take the tool back and nail or screw into place the holding nails or um, screws and you’re done!
Except for the small bit about not actually even starting to turn over the garden. But when you’ve done that and moved a dead squirrel carcass that you’ve been waiting for bugs to eat so that you can retrieve its tiny skull with it’s tiny teeth, well, then you have an Official Spring Garden! Yay!
Now I just need to plant the other beds in something….