Gardening : Tips, Tools to Help Older Gardening Enthusiasts
Even the simplest gardening tasks--like sowing seeds--may become formidable as you grow old. But help is available, from special tools to expert advice, to keep your thumb green.
Many gardeners devise their own ways to cope with, or avoid, the pain of pushing, pulling, handling, stooping, squatting and kneeling.
As digital dexterity waned, I found tweezers indispensable to pick up tiny seeds and plant them just where I want them. And at least one company (Harris Seeds of Rochester, N.Y.) markets pelleted seeds encased in a white coating that makes them easier to see as well as handle.
Some devices are expensive, but others require only ingenuity and make-do materials. For instance, you can stack three old tires and fill the hole in the middle with soil to make a planter just high enough for easy tending from a wheelchair.
Gardening indoors under fluorescent lights gives you many of the benefits and few of the inconveniences, or the expense, of a greenhouse. You can start with a small two-tube unit and go as far as you want. Fluorescent stands of all sizes are available at garden centers and hardware stores, or you can make your own. My wife and I share a custom-made one along a wall of our dining room. She does flowers and I grow salad greens in the winter and start plants for summer.
Raised-bed and container gardening also make chores easier. Craig Hospital of Englewood, Colo., has put out a booklet on raised-bed techniques, which, as the name implies, essentially involve planting above ground level.
A similar pamphlet was published by the Horticulture Department of Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg, Va. And the American Horticultural Therapy Assn. of Gaithersburg, Md., is a fruitful source of information for many aspects of gardening for the handicapped and elderly.A few years ago, the National Gardening Assn., of Burlington, Vt., put out a booklet called “Tools and Techniques for Easier Gardening.” This is unfortunately out of print, but may still be available through libraries.
Divided into sections on soil preparation, planting, weeding, cultivating, watering and harvesting, it lists scores of special tools and companies that market them. It also abounds with homespun suggestions from many sources.
Helen Ashworth of Heuvelton, N.Y., for example, said a chair with boards attached to the legs so it wouldn’t sink into the ground enabled her mother to hoe while sitting and thus continue gardening much longer than she expected.
Eleanor Patterson of San Francisco suggested using barbecue tongs to pull weeds, transplant small plants or remove dead leaves from hard-to-reach areas.
You can buy kneeling pads, make your own from a piece of foam rubber, or just use old cushions. Lightweight combination kneeler-sitters are available, easy to reverse and to grab onto to lower and lift yourself. Grips attached to the handles of shovels, hoes, spading forks or rakes reduce bending or arm strain. Hoes turned upside down become canes.
Indoors, there are planter pulleys enabling you to lower and lift hanging plants and lock them into any position for watering or other tasks.
If you regularly turn the soil of your vegetable garden, power tillers as light as 17 pounds make the chore easier. They come with various attachments, including lawn thatchers. But keeping a garden fertile by mulching with leaves, grass clippings and other composting material eliminates much toil involving heavy equipment.
Perennials also may reduce the volume of work, especially in decorative gardening, but a couple of vegetables also come in this class. Asparagus beds may last 50 years and more; rhubarb also repeats year after year with practically no care. My modest asparagus patch, 20 years old, provided more than 700 spears this year in a harvest period lasting two months. All I do is lay down a mulch of salt hay to keep down weeds and fertilize once a year.
Among plants that need sowing annually, squashes offer long-lasting harvests, as do broccoli, pole beans and tomatoes of indeterminate varieties. Some lettuces are cut-and-come-again types. Ditto for New Zealand spinach and Swiss chard.
But the biggest help and encouragement for gardeners comes from the plants themselves. They want to live and grow. And they don’t care whether you use tweezers to plant seeds or featherweight hoes to zap weeds.
