A week ago marked the end of my first year of widowhood, so I hope you won't mind if I spend this column telling you about my incredibly imaginative husband and the clever things he made for me during our fifty years together.
Hank wasn't a gardener, but he produced great ideas to make my garden chores easier. Here's a perfect example, the compost bin.
I spent many years with just two small compost piles. I was always trying to empty one so I could fork over the second and start a new one. When Hank told me his idea for the new compost bin I was thrilled. I waited patiently and then impatiently for it to be created. I'm definitely an impatient person. I'd rather turn right on red and go two blocks out of my way than wait for the light to turn green. I'd rather live without milk or coffee than face the checkout line on a Saturday. When my pea seeds don't pop up in three weeks I find myself digging them up to see if they've rotted.
An impatient person should not have a procrastinator for a spouse, but as we all know, opposites attract. Hank was an incredibly inventive fellow, but it sometimes took years before one of his great ideas bore fruit. The new compost bin took three years, but it was worth the wait. A garden cart full of weeds or leaves or frost blackened plants can be dumped into this bin from above. Instead of the back-breaking job of turning a pile by hand, it became a job for the tractor. Scooping up a pile into the bucket and lifting it high and then tilting the bucket, turned the pile over with ease.
A great many of Hank's inventions have been described in detail in my book or in previous columns, so I am not elaborating on how they are made here. The "No Hands" gate to the vegetable garden was one of his best, and worth the years of waiting. It is designed to lift off its latch with a foot when both hands are busy with the garden cart or carrying buckets or a grandchild.
We have a lot of gates on Locust Hill. Hank attached shiny pieces of tin to far off pasture gates so we could tell if one had been left open. Since there's a serious barbed wire fence between our house and Bridget's, he found a large flat rock and placed it under the fence, then slit and slipped pieces of plastic pipe over the strands, so when we climb over we can avoid the barbs.
For years I got pachysandra from a patch in the woods up in Norfolk whenever I started a new bed, but when we cleared the bank above the new stone wall, he scooped up buckets full of the pachysandra that I'd planted there and replanted them in the woods along the railroad bed for future transplanting. Now there are four different patches of pach flourishing around the farm within easy access.
When we finally replaced the falling-down split rail fence at the bottom of the sheep pasture, Hank had already split the new rails from old telephone poles, all heavily creosoted, that had been abandoned by the power company when they removed the line across the back of the property. He built the funny round house we used as a sauna with old silo boards, fitted together like the staves of a barrel, then covered the roof with industrial rubber so I could grow plants on it.
Since we keep our woodstoves burning most of the winter, Hank designed a saw horse that is ten feet long (see a photo in wood column), marked in stove lengths so five or six logs can be cut at a time to just the right lengths. He made a handsome wood box on wheels that can be placed just inside the front door with the storm door hooked open with a piece of coat hanger, so I can load it with wood and wheel it back to the playroom with ease.
Inside the house there are dozens
of clever ideas that help me out every
day and remind me of Hank. Don't you
love this door? He built a solid board
wall, then cut out the door with its heart
and crown with a jitter saw. He made
the hand rail on the cellar stairs out of
a long limb from a maple tree, sanded
` as smooth as marble, but nicely crooked.
When my ficus vine died of thirst, he de-
signed a planter that sits atop the toilet
tank with holes in the bottom so the roots
can creep down and always find water.
He built my computer table - just two feet high to fit me and my "pea shelling chair", all my files and reference books.
When I began flying to other parts of the country to give my garden club programs, he made me a wooden guitar case which holds all my photographs as well as the guitar. It opens up to become an easel to display the photographs.
Here's one more invention. Bet you can't guess what it is.
We have a cathedral ceiling in the guest house and for some reason every spring a flurry of house flies gathers at the peak, making a large ugly black festering circle. This tool holds an aerosol can of fly killer with a string attached so once it's positioned in front of the fly collection they can be sprayed.
Hank has departed this life, but he has left me a vast callection of ideas that will live here on Locust Hill for generations to come. Ah, what a guy!
