jdreinhart73@gmail.com – TangleWicket.com

The Wheelbarrow: Do You Actually Need One?

A wheelbarrow is a significant purchase and a genuinely useful tool — for certain gardens. Here’s how to know if yours is one of them before you spend the money.

The wheelbarrow feels like essential garden equipment. It’s in every garden catalog. It appears in every garden scene in every movie. It is, visually, what “garden tool” looks like.

It is also bulky, expensive, takes up significant storage space, and is occasionally unnecessary for the garden you actually have. Tom Brownthumb bought one in his first season. It lived in the garage for two years before he had a use case large enough to justify it.

Here’s how to decide whether your garden needs a wheelbarrow — or whether a different tool does the same job at a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the storage footprint.

✅ When You Genuinely Need a Wheelbarrow

You’re moving bulk material. Cubic yards of compost, mulch, topsoil, or gravel. If you’re buying material by the cubic yard and moving it from the delivery pile to the beds, a wheelbarrow is the right tool. Doing this with buckets is technically possible and genuinely miserable.
You have a large garden. A quarter-acre or more of actively managed garden space generates enough material — weeds, prunings, harvest waste, compost inputs — that having a wheeled transport tool pays for itself in time and back strain.
You’re doing structural work. Building raised beds, laying paths, moving rocks, landscaping. The wheelbarrow is a construction tool as much as a garden tool, and for moving heavy material across a yard it has no peer.

❌ When You Probably Don’t

Small urban or suburban garden. A raised bed or two, a patio container setup, a modest plot. The material volumes are low enough that a garden trug or large bucket handles transport easily.
Limited storage. A wheelbarrow requires several square feet of dedicated storage space. If your shed is already full, the wheelbarrow lives outside and rusts faster than it earns its keep.

🪜 The Alternatives Worth Knowing

Garden trug. A flexible, lightweight tub that holds a surprising volume of material. Folds flat for storage. Handles compost, weeds, harvest, and small material transfers without effort. The right tool for most small-garden transport needs.
Garden cart. Four wheels instead of two, larger flat bed, more stable. Better for very heavy loads that would tip a wheelbarrow. Takes more storage space than a wheelbarrow.
Five-gallon buckets. Free from home improvement stores or cheap to buy. Stackable, versatile, zero storage footprint. For small-scale material moving, a pair of buckets is as efficient as a wheelbarrow for most tasks.

🔍 If You Do Buy a Wheelbarrow

Pneumatic tire over solid. A pneumatic (air-filled) tire rolls more easily over soft ground and uneven surfaces than a solid tire. Worth the slight maintenance tradeoff of occasional pressure checks.
Steel tray over plastic. More durable, handles sharp materials without cracking, longer lifespan overall.
Cubic capacity. A standard wheelbarrow holds about three to five cubic feet. Larger capacity means fewer trips but more weight per load. Match the size to how much you can realistically lift when full.

🛒 The Options

Marathon residential wheelbarrow — Pneumatic tire, steel tray, reliable residential workhorse. The solid starting point.
Gorilla Carts garden cart — Four-wheeled stability for heavy loads. Easier to use than a wheelbarrow for anyone with balance or strength concerns.
Flexible garden trug — The small-garden alternative. Holds more than it looks like it should, stores flat, handles most suburban garden transport tasks efficiently.

As an Amazon affiliate, I earn from each qualifying purchase. Thank you for supporting TangleWicket.

✨ The Short Version

Buy a wheelbarrow if you’re moving bulk material, have a large garden, or do structural landscape work. Consider a trug or cart if your garden is smaller and your storage is limited.

The wheelbarrow is a great tool. It is not a mandatory tool for every garden.

Wicket does not have strong feelings about wheelbarrows. Wicket is too small to push one.

📚 Related Reads

TangleWicket is part of the WhistleBump group – find the rest of the family at WhistleBump.com.

Kneeling Pads and Garden Seats: Worth It or Not?

Kneeling in a garden without protection is a choice with consequences. Here’s what garden kneelers and seats actually do, which type makes sense for your situation, and why your knees will thank you.

Gardening happens close to the ground. Planting, weeding, transplanting, harvesting — most of the work requires either kneeling, squatting, or bending at a waist that does not appreciate the transaction.

For young gardeners with functional knees and flexible backs, this is a minor inconvenience. For everyone else, and for young gardeners who would like to remain comfortable well into their gardening future, the question of how you get down and back up again is worth thinking about.

The answer is not complicated. It’s a foam pad, a kneeler, or a seat — whichever matches your specific situation. Here’s how to choose.

🟫 The Foam Kneeling Pad

The simplest solution. A dense foam pad, typically half an inch to an inch thick, that sits between your knees and the ground. It cushions hard or rocky soil, provides minor insulation from cold ground, and costs almost nothing.

Best for: gardeners with healthy knees doing short-duration work in a relatively confined area. The pad moves with you, doesn’t take up storage space, and does its job without ceremony.

The limitation: it doesn’t help you get up. If your knees or back make the transition from kneeling to standing difficult, a foam pad addresses the kneeling discomfort but not the getting-up problem.

🪑 The Kneeler/Seat Combo

The folding metal-framed kneeler with padded surface that converts from a kneeling pad to a low seat by flipping it over. The side rails double as handles to assist getting up and down.

Best for: anyone for whom the transition between kneeling and standing is uncomfortable. The handles take significant load off knees and back during those transitions. The seat function provides an alternative to kneeling for tasks that can be done from a slightly higher position.

The better models hold several hundred pounds, fold flat for storage, and last for many seasons. The cheaper models bend under real use. This is one where the quality difference is meaningful.

🪑 The Garden Seat

A lightweight rolling or walking stool that keeps you off the ground entirely. You sit on the seat at a low height and move around without kneeling.

Best for: extended close work where kneeling is not practical for the duration. Row weeding, bed preparation work, seedling planting over a long stretch. Also the right tool for anyone for whom kneeling is genuinely not an option.

The limitation: only works on relatively flat, firm ground. Doesn’t function well on uneven terrain or very soft soil.

📏 The Honest Recommendation

If your knees and back are fine: a foam kneeling pad is sufficient and costs five dollars.

If getting up and down is difficult: the kneeler/seat combo with handles is the right tool and pays for itself in the first season.

If kneeling isn’t an option: a garden seat or rolling stool.

The underlying principle: gardening should be comfortable enough that you do it. Equipment that makes you more comfortable in the garden is equipment that gets you into the garden more often. That’s the whole point.

🛒 What to Buy

Thick foam kneeling pad — Simple, lightweight, effective for straightforward kneeling. The no-fuss starting point.
Abco kneeler and seat combo — Robust construction, useful handles, converts between kneeler and seat. The most versatile option for most gardeners.
Gardener’s rolling work seat — For extended row work or anyone for whom kneeling is not practical. Rolls smoothly on firm ground.

As an Amazon affiliate, I earn from each qualifying purchase. Thank you for supporting TangleWicket.

✨ The Short Version

Foam pad for simple situations. Kneeler/seat combo for anyone with knee or back concerns. Garden seat for extended work or when kneeling isn’t practical.

The ground is hard. Your knees are not getting younger. A twelve-dollar pad is worth it.

Tom Brownthumb gardened without knee protection for years. Tom Brownthumb’s knees have opinions about this that he now shares freely.

📚 Related Reads

TangleWicket is part of the WhistleBump group – find the rest of the family at WhistleBump.com.

₃₁₀₀₇

The Flowers That Come Back Every Year Without Help

Some perennials are so reliable they border on rude about it. You plant them once, ignore them completely, and they come back bigger every spring. These are the ones.

There is a category of perennial that does not require your attention, your anxiety, or your apology. You plant it, it establishes, and it returns every spring with more confidence than it had the year before. It does not ask for fertilizer. It does not require winter protection. It simply persists.

These are the plants that build a garden’s backbone while the gardener is doing something else.

🌸 Black-Eyed Susan (Rudbeckia)

The most cheerful and least demanding perennial in common cultivation. Yellow petals, dark center, blooms from midsummer to frost. It spreads slowly by self-seeding, which means a small planting becomes a larger one over a few years without any effort. It tolerates poor soil, drought, and neglect with something approaching good humor.

Plant it once and it will be there longer than you expected.

🌺 Purple Coneflower (Echinacea)

Drought tolerant, native to North America, beloved by pollinators, and increasingly available in colors beyond purple — pink, white, orange, yellow. Coneflowers establish slowly but once settled they are effectively permanent. They also self-seed, and the seedlings, once they appear, can be transplanted wherever you’d like them.

Leave the seed heads standing through winter. Birds eat them. It is the plant doing double duty.

☀️ Daylily (Hemerocallis)

Technically not a true lily, but that distinction can be seen as entirely academic. Daylilies bloom heavily, spread by root division (meaning the clump gets larger each year and you can eventually divide it and plant the divisions elsewhere), and ask almost nothing of the gardener. They tolerate clay soil, periodic drought, and general inattention.

The one quirk: each individual bloom lasts one day. This is not a problem because the plant produces dozens of buds in sequence, and the effect is continuous bloom for several weeks.

🍃 Catmint (Nepeta)

Soft gray-green foliage, clouds of small lavender-blue flowers, drought-tolerant, and pollinators absolutely mob it. Cut it back by half after the first flush of bloom and it will rebloom in fall. Deer don’t eat it. Rabbits don’t eat it. The bees, however, are completely devoted to it.

It also smells pleasant, which is more than can be said for most things that are this easy to grow.

🌼 Shasta Daisy

The classic white daisy with the yellow center, taller and longer-lived than an annual daisy, blooms in early summer and can be coaxed into a second flush with deadheading. It spreads slowly, tolerates average soil, and looks exactly like what people think of when they imagine a garden.

Tom Brownthumb planted three in his first summer. He now has nine, without having planted any of the additional six. This is the entire argument for perennials in one data point.

🛒 Gear Worth Having

Eden Brothers All Perennial Wildflower Seed Mix — 19 perennial varieties including coneflower, black-eyed Susan, and shasta daisy. The economical way to establish a permanent backbone.

Organo Republic 16 Perennial Wildflower Seeds Mix — 100,000+ seeds, 16 perennial varieties. Covers large areas and returns year after year.

Survival Garden Seeds 36-Pack Annual & Perennial Flower Kit — A broad starter collection with both annuals and perennials. Plant the annuals for immediate color while the perennials establish.

As an Amazon affiliate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Thank you for supporting TangleWicket.

📖 Related Reads

TangleWicket is part of the WhistleBump group – find the rest of the family at WhistleBump.com.

₃₆₀₀₉

The Hoe: Wildly Underrated, Wildly Misused

The hoe is the most underrated tool in the garden. Most beginners ignore it. Most experienced gardeners rely on it. Here’s why it matters and how it actually works.

The hoe does not get the respect it deserves. It lacks the tactile satisfaction of a good trowel and the authority of a spade. It looks like a tool your grandparents used and possibly left in the barn. It is unflashy and uncelebrated.

It is also the reason experienced gardeners don’t spend half their time pulling weeds.

Here’s what a hoe actually does, why beginners almost always misuse it, and how using it correctly changes the entire weed management equation in your garden.

🤔 What the Hoe Is Actually For

The hoe’s job is to sever weed stems just below the soil surface, killing the weed without digging it out. When used regularly — every week or two, before weeds establish and develop deep root systems — it prevents the weed problem from ever becoming serious.

Why this matters: weeds pulled after they’ve established roots are harder to remove and more likely to leave root fragments that regrow. Weeds severed just after germination, when their root systems are shallow, die and decompose in place. The hoe catches them at their most vulnerable.

The key insight: hoeing is most effective on dry days when severed seedlings can desiccate quickly in the sun and air. Hoeing on a wet day leaves weed seedlings with enough moisture to re-root. Time your hoeing with the weather.

❌ How Most Beginners Misuse It

The most common hoe mistake is using it like a pickaxe — hacking at established weeds and compacted soil with aggressive downward strokes. This is hard work that accomplishes less than it should, because the target weeds are too established, the technique is wrong, and the tool is working against its design.

The hoe is a slicing tool, not a chopping tool. The motion is horizontal, not vertical. The blade moves parallel to the soil surface, just below it, cutting stems at the root line. A light touch with the right technique is faster and more effective than aggressive hacking.

🔧 The Different Hoe Types

Standard flat hoe. The traditional design. One flat blade perpendicular to the handle. Effective and inexpensive. Works best with a push motion along rows.
Stirrup hoe (hula hoe). A loop-shaped blade that cuts on both push and pull strokes. Twice as efficient as a standard hoe in the same amount of time. The upgrade worth making for any gardener who hoes regularly.
Collinear hoe. A long, narrow blade designed for precise weeding close to plants without disturbing them. Favored by market gardeners. More specialized, excellent for intensive gardens.
Warren hoe. A pointed blade designed for making furrows for seed sowing. Not primarily a weeding tool, but useful for direct sowing in rows.

For most beginners, the stirrup hoe is the one to buy. It outperforms the flat hoe at the same price point and makes the actual work of weeding noticeably faster.

📏 Handle Length

A hoe with a handle the right length lets you work in an upright or near-upright position without constant bending. The right length is roughly the distance from the ground to your chin.

Most standard hoes come with a 54-inch or 60-inch handle. Taller gardeners benefit from the longer option. Working hunched over a handle that’s too short negates the efficiency advantage of hoeing over hand weeding.

🛒 The Hoes Worth Having

Flexrake stirrup hoe — Cuts on push and pull. The most efficient standard hoe design for regular garden use.
CobraHead long-handled weeder — A curved blade that combines hoeing and cultivating in one tool. Excellent for working close to plants.
Draw flat hoe — Premium Dutch-made flat hoe. Forged steel, long handle, excellent quality for serious gardeners.

As an Amazon affiliate, I earn from each qualifying purchase. Thank you for supporting TangleWicket.

✨ The Short Version

The hoe prevents the weed problem. Pulling weeds treats the weed problem. Prevention is faster, easier, and more effective.

Use the stirrup hoe. Hoe on dry days. Hoe regularly before weeds establish. Work with a slicing motion, not a chopping one.

Tom Brownthumb spent four seasons pulling weeds by hand. The season he bought a stirrup hoe, he spent four hours total on weeds. The math is not subtle.

📚 Related Reads

TangleWicket is part of the WhistleBump group – find the rest of the family at WhistleBump.com.

₃₁₀₀₉

Seeds vs. Seedlings: Which One Should a Beginner Actually Buy?

Seeds are cheaper. Seedlings are faster. Neither one is obviously better. Here’s how to choose — and why picking the wrong one for the wrong plant is how gardens get off to a rocky start.

The garden center is a wonderful and dangerous place. There are seeds in little packets for seventy-nine cents, and there are seedlings in little pots for four dollars each, and nobody is explaining why one costs five times more than the other or which one Tom Brownthumb should be reaching for.

Here’s the honest answer: both are right, depending on what you’re growing, when you’re growing it, and how much patience you have on any given Tuesday in April.

The fundamental difference: seeds are the beginning of the story. Seedlings are the story already several chapters in. You’re either starting from scratch or buying yourself some time.

🌰 The Case for Seeds

Seeds are cheap. Absurdly cheap compared to seedlings. A packet of tomato seeds costs less than a single tomato plant and contains enough seeds to start a small operation. For anyone growing multiples of the same thing — sunflowers, beans, zucchini, lettuce — seeds are the obvious economic choice.

When seeds make sense: plants that don’t like being transplanted are always better started from seed directly in the ground. Carrots, beans, peas, radishes, and most root vegetables develop tap roots that object strenuously to being moved. Plant these kind of plants in the space where they’re going to live.

Seeds also give you access to varieties the garden center never carries. The garden center stocks twelve tomato varieties. Seed catalogs stock hundreds. If you have opinions about tomatoes — and eventually you will — seeds are where those opinions get expressed.

The tradeoff: time. Seeds need weeks to become plants. Some need to be started indoors before the last frost date. There is a calendar involved and it has opinions.

🌿 The Case for Seedlings

Seedlings are time already purchased. Someone else did the germination work, the thinning, the early watering, the careful temperature management. You are paying for those weeks, and sometimes those weeks are worth the money.

When seedlings make sense: plants with long growing seasons — tomatoes, peppers, eggplant — need so many weeks to mature that starting from seed outdoors isn’t practical in most climates. Unless you’re starting seeds indoors in February, you’re buying seedlings.

Seedlings are also the right choice when you only want one or two plants. Buying a packet of twenty-five pepper seeds to grow two peppers is wasteful. Buy two pepper seedlings and call it done.

The tradeoff: cost, and transplant shock. Every seedling goes through a period of adjustment after it moves from the garden center to your soil. It will look terrible for a week. This is normal. See our post on transplant shock.

🗓️ The Quick Reference

Start from seed: beans, peas, carrots, radishes, beets, sunflowers, zucchini, cucumbers, lettuce, spinach.
Buy as seedlings: tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, broccoli, cauliflower, celery — anything with a long season that needs a head start.
Either works: basil, kale, chard, most herbs, marigolds, nasturtiums. Pick whichever makes more sense for your budget and timeline.

🛒 Worth Having

Seed starting tray with dome — For starting seeds indoors. The dome holds humidity while seeds germinate. Remove it once seedlings appear.
Seed starting mix — Not the same as potting soil. Seed starting mix is finer, lighter, and designed for germination. Seeds started in regular soil struggle.
Plant markers — Label everything immediately. All seedlings look identical at two inches tall and you will not remember what you planted where. This is a promise.
Seed storage organizer — For the seeds you don’t use this season. Stored cool and dry, most seeds remain viable for two to three years.

As an Amazon affiliate, I earn from each qualifying purchase. Thank you for supporting TangleWicket.

✨ The Short Version

Seeds for direct-sow plants and budget-conscious gardeners with patience. Seedlings for long-season plants and anyone who would like something to actually happen this year.

Neither choice is wrong. Both choices involve some dirt under the fingernails eventually.

Wicket doesn’t care which one you pick. Wicket just wants you to put something in the ground.

📚 Related Reads

TangleWicket is part of the WhistleBump group – find the rest of the family at WhistleBump.com.

₃₀₀₀₁