Wood Turning for Summer - Planting Tools of Yesterday and Today
By Darrell Feltmate Wood turners as a group tend to be people who appreciate the out of doors, whether it be to walk in the woods as pure enjoyment of nature or a search for the wood that makes a treasure yet to be seen. Such a turn of enjoyment also tends to make the turner of wood into a person who appreciates a summer garden with its blooms and foliage of myriad colors. How then, might one integrate the two? Wood has long had its place in the garden. The earliest tools were made of wood whether the handle or blade of a shovel or trowel. Many gardens are edged with wood either in the form of rounds from a trunk, boards laid as brick or the more modern railroad tie given new life as garden surround. The fascination with raised bed gardening in recent times has only added to the use of week as border and edging. Moreover, who could forget the fascination of peering through the wooden pickets of the old fence into the forbidden world of the neighbor’s garden when one was merely a lad or lass, thinking of the first strawberry of the season? Even for something as simple a planting tool, the wood turner may step forward. These days a trowel of metal and plastic is the norm while only a few short years ago a gardener would have used a wooden dibber, sometimes called a dibble, to get the seeds and bulbs in place. Certainly no English gardener would be found without one. There are still a few places where one can purchase a dibber, and organic gardeners have become once again champions of these simple tools of wood, but for the turner they are a simple project and can be made to fit one’s hand. A piece of suitable wood such as maple or ash is placed on the lathe and turned round. A handle of about four inches is turned at one end and then the other is given an elegant curve to a blunt point. For the purposes of later planting, particularly of bulbs, a series of rings is etched along the curve with the pint of a skew, about an inch apart. These serve as depth gages to ensure that seeds and bulbs are planted to the correct depth. Usually a dibber is used in well prepared garden soil. Either it is used to lightly scratch a line for planting small seeds or inserted a bit deeper for the large ones. It is at bulb planting it excels. For a bulb to be planted three inches deep as for instance in the case of a gladioli, the dibber is plunged to a depth of four inches as indicated by its depth lines. This allows for later infilling of the hole by a bit of dirt and leaving the three inch depth required by the bulb. In fact the hole tends to fill up with earth, especially in good, well tilled ground, and this discourages many who do not know the trick to a dibber to conclude that it is no good. In fact, it is merely necessary to insert the tool and rotate it in a small circle to the circumference of the bulb to leave the proper hole with lightly packed earth on the sides. A bulb is inserted into the hole and the dibber plunged immediately beside it and rocked back and forth. As the dibber is removed it backfills over the bulb and leaves a hole for watering that will gradually be filled with earth from the gentle erosion of the summer rains. As one uses a dibber in the garden from the hand of the wood turner it is not hard to realize that we have joined the ranks of gardeners from yesteryear in carefully planting for the future. Darrell Feltmate is a juried wood turner whose web site, http://aroundthewoods.com , contains detailed information about wood turning for the novice or experienced turner as well as a collection of turnings for your viewing pleasure. You too can learn to turn wood, here is the place to start. Wondering what it looks like? Follow the page links for a free video. http://aroundthewoods.comYou can easily ask your questions about wood turning at his blog athttp://roundopinions.blogspot.com as well as comment on any thing related to the web site, this article or other aspects of wood turning, art and craft. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Darrell_Feltmate http://EzineArticles.com/?Wood-Turning-for-Summer—Planting-Tools-of-Yesterday-and-Today&id=540657 texas bad credit car loan free credit report credit score rates - lists credit report charge offs
