Be Less Boring

The soil in my yard is heavy clay.  That's great if you want to make bricks but its not much good for anything else.  Add a little rain or melting snow and you end up with a glue-like mud that sticks to everything, your shoes, shovels, and any vegetables you pull out of the ground.   This means I need to wash the mud off before I bring anything in the house.

I also needed a basket to carry all the vegetables that I pick.  I've been using various plastic containers but they're often too small and hard to carry single-handed.

While searching around, I found the perfect solution, the Maine Garden Hod.  Its based on the hods clammers have used for decades and is designed to carry vegetables and allow them to be easily hosed off.  Perfect!  Except for that $40 price tag.  Yeah, it's not horribly expensive but I knew I could build one out of mostly spare parts and leftovers for much less.   So, I did a little Googling and found some other people with the same idea.

First off, I found the patent documents for the Maine Garden Hod.   That was interesting but didn't really tell me anything I didn't already know.  Then I found a nice version created by the Unusually Unusual Farmchick.  I liked the size and shape of her hod, and the feet she added to it.  However, her version didn't have a handle, so it wouldn't be easy to carry one-handed.   Then I saw the one Mickey from Wisconsin made.  It was a little smaller than I wanted, a little boxy looking, and I didn't like the way the handle attached--it looked like it might pull off under heavy load or after long use.   I did like the fact that Mickey's was made entirely of ceder, which should last a good long time but cedar is hard to find around here, especially in larger dimensions.   Finally, I saw the hod made by RunnerDuck.  That one was a little small but had an interesting solution for the handle.  I didn't like the fact that the handle was attached to doglegs, though.

In the end I ended up basing my hod on Farmchick's but added a handle.   It ended up costing me about $15 worth of materials but would have cost a good deal less if I hadn't burned two nice pieces of 1x12 last month that I thought were too small for any project I'd ever come up with.    Construction took about an hour and I designed as I went along.  Measurements were quick and dirty and the curves were drawn around a couple of different sizes of paint cans.  The hardware cloth, nails, glue, and polyurethane were leftovers from other projects.

Here's the finished product:

So, yeah, there it is.  I'm mad at myself for burning the small pieces of 1x12 that I had.  I think I'd have kept them if I had a bigger house.  It's my frugal, Yankee nature to save anything that is potentially useful but space is at such a premium in this place that I'm constantly getting rid of things that I'd rather keep.  It almost always happens that I find a use for anything I get rid of a short time later.  Frustrating!

Now I'm thinking about the best ways to build a cold frame.   I've got a couple of glass shower doors and an unused basement-type window that I could do something with.   Probably have to wait for the ground to thaw to really do much with that one, though.  Stay tuned.