Please note that items are listed in U.S prices.
1. Extreme Close-View Monocular – $16.95 A small, pocket-sized viewing scope that magnifies objects 7x from 10″ to infinity. Perfect for the geeky gardener or amateur naturalist in your life who enjoy getting a closer look at insects and flowers in the garden. It’s also really helpful for identifying bugs and disease. Of course, some may prefer to see those things from way back here, thank you very much.
2. Earthly Paradise Calendula Salve – $12.99 I make my own but if I were going to buy hand salve I would buy it from Earthly Paradise who just happen to make a killer salve. A healing hand salve is an absolute necessity for gardener’s like me who prefer not to wear gloves since the soil can really sap the moisture right out of your hands.
3. Oak Nail Brush – $12.36 It’s become a ritual: Returning from the garden the first thing I do is scrub my hands and nails with a bar of my favourite oatmeal soap and a good nailbrush. This beautiful oak brush is handmade using white tampico bristles — I have no idea what that is but it sounds terribly posh! And really, at that price it kind of is.
4. Richter’s Pot Maker – $12.95 Make your own seed-starting pots using newspaper — recycled and free you’ll never complain about running out of pots again.
5. Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education by Michael Pollan – $11.20 This isn’t a how-to guide but a book ABOUT the act of gardening and a “…manifesto for rethinking our relationship with nature.” A great thinking book for any gardener and one that I have personally gone back to many times.
6. Kitchen Compost Pails – $16.95 Again a Lee Valley item. I have seen these pails available elsewhere however they tend to be priced at a few dollars more. These buckets act like a sort-of purgatory for kitchen scraps, a holding station between produce and the compost bin. Believe me, being frugal-ish people we were resistant to purchasing a special container just to hold kitchen scraps on our counter, juggling an assortment of yogurt containers before finally taking the plunge. It was so worth it. This baby holds a lot and the handle makes it easy to carry out to the composter, especially given that we often have to carry ours a few blocks to our community garden plot!
7. Modern Birdhouses – $195 Like their human-sized counterparts these birdhouses modeled after real Modernist houses designed in the Case Study Houses Series are not cheap. But say I had a lot of money, and say I had enough that I could splurge on a very fancy birdhouse, I’d get the Richard. Just saying.
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