Old Faithful (Hori Hori R.I.P. #3)

Honestly, I'm surprised I lasted this long. I've heard it happens to all gardeners eventually, you just never expect it when it's your turn. How appropriate, though, that it happened on my first day with my brand new replacement Hori Hori Knife. For those readers not following along, I "lost" my trusty Hori Hori a couple months ago and have been eulogizing its loss by enumerating its many fun uses. Today I discovered a fun new use: Geyser-Creating-Device!
The story pretty much writes itself, but is best imagined in jerky, black and white silent-movie slapstickery. Two gardeners idly chatting, enjoying a leisurely Monday of planting seasonal beds for autumn. One gardener pulls out a Hori Hori knife to plant some bulbs (a la R.I.P #2). His face gradually shows signs of frustration, as the ground seems to be much harder and rockier than he would like. Bulb by bulb, he begins jabbing the ground harder and harder. Boy, this must be some soil! He wipes sweat off his face and laughs; fortunately there are only a few more bulbs left to plant. Ha ha! Jab jab jab and then the screen erupts in white! Oh goodness, he's hit a PVC irrigation pipe and stabbed right through it with that fool knife of his! A 12 foot geyser is shooting out of the ground and he's flat on his ass with a priceless look on his dripping wet face; the other gardener is running around clearly yelling and (if you can read lips) clearing swearing up a storm!

The rest of the afternoon is not nearly so well-scripted and tends to drag on into increasingly muddy and shameful trips to the local hardware store as successive attempts to repair the problem before the clients get home are met with more catastrophic damage of the irrigation system, more livid cursing than ever, and more pitying looks from the hardware store employees.
So dear diary today I learned that a Hori Hori knife piloted by impatience and frustration can become a terrible force of nature, spawning elemental water spouts from seemingly dry ground; I also learned how not to repair broken PVC pipe (turns out there's more than one way!) and, just in the nick of time before the end of the day, how to correctly repair broken PVC pipe. And now, for the rest of the season, every bulb I plant will be just a little bit too shallow because frankly I'm terrified to dig anymore.

Hori Hori R.I.P. #2

How could I forget planting bulbs!
After planting a few hundred yesterday, I don't think I'll ever forget again! I'm planting bulbs in my dreams and vacant gazes; my hands are on auto-pilot, inappropriately stabbing any nearby surface during casual living-room conversations, clawing for that magical depth of 6" because I'm subconsciously sure that the couch would look lovely in the spring with a dozen tulips poking out of its cushions. Bulbs go anywhere! Bulbs go everywhere! I'm Johnny Appleseed's less popular and more often medicated brother Tommy Tulipbulb!

I guess if you have to go nuts planting too many bulbs, you may as well have a hori hori knife along for the ride. I know there are any number of tools sold for the sole purpose of planting bulbs (including some spectacularly ineffective drill bits that are supposed to carve out a nice tidy hole - do not ask my boss about these unless your sweet tooth is craving a lengthy tirade against the retail nursery industry and the "idiots" who work therein) but the hori hori exists to make such specialized tools unnecessary. I do not want 260 tools in my kit, one for every task I'm faced with; I want 1 tool (OK, 2 if you count my Leatherman) which stays always on my belt. The hori-hori negates the need to "dig a hole" for every single bulb you have to plant. Instead, you just stab-stab-stab a narrow column in the soil, drop in a bulb, cover up and repeat... several hundred times!

Hori Hori R.I.P. #1

I'll start off with one of the more unusual applications I have discovered for the Hori Hori: hedging-residue-buildup-scraper.
During hedging season, the only enemies standing between myself and a successful day of clipping hedges are sharpening and cleaning. Sharpening for obvious reasons: even the best made hedge shears will succumb to hours upon consecutive hours of blade-dulling action and nothing is more frustrating than making a series of well-placed cuts only to find out that nothing has, in fact, been cut.
Less obvious is the not-so-slow buildup of mashed leaf bits (I could wax plant-physiological here and throw out some speculations as to which cell parts are most likely to stick to a blade, but ultimately it's just mashed, smashed plant matter) which accumulates along a certain axis of each cutting blade. This accumulation is somewhat sticky and serves to slow down the speed of my cuts, to mess up the timing and placement of my cuts (thus messing up the shape of a given hedge) and to reduce me to a livid, cursing, anthropomorphizing singularity of gardening rage.
There is no way to traditionally "clean" this residue off of the shears, it responds only to physical force (steel wool, wire brush, etc.) and even then only moderately. One day, when my steel brush was bent and flattened beyond all use, I decided to try scraping the flat edge of my hori hori knife against the blade of the shears and, lo-and-behold, gunk gone! Score one for Hori Hori!

The Surgeon And I

Does a surgeon have a favorite scalpel? One he/she uses more often than is strictly necessary? One whose versatility and usefulness have grown as a function of the surgeon's own sentimental attachment to the point of its being used in borderline inappropriate circumstances, say trying to hack through a bone in lieu of a bonesaw or even being snuck home in a pocket to use as a steak knife on the weekend? If the surgeon inexplicably misplaces the scalpel after years of loyal service, is he utterly lost? Does he suit up for surgery only to freeze at the operating table like a first year med-school student with second-thoughts, realizing he could no more perform surgery without his sidekick scalpel than he could stand up on the table and sing the Magna Carta to the tune (and in a round) of row-row-row your boat?
If this is the case (and I, for one, strongly suspect it is) then I have nothing but sympathy and compassion for the poor surgeon because I am a kindred lost soul.

I am without my Hori Hori Knife.

I cannot forgive myself, because it was my own inexcusable fault for leaving it behind in a raised bed along a busy street, like some forged siren singing its many magical properties to all passers-by. I only hope whoever took it will give it a good home, and discover for it many more uses to add to my own extensive list.
For anyone unfamiliar with a Hori Hori Knife (it's okay, you don't have to feel ashamed), it is quite simply my favorite gardening tool and without its reassuring weight on my belt I feel like less of a gardener, less of a man somehow. It is an indestructible 6" Japanese steel blade with a simple wood handle; it is not sharp per-se, but it has one dully serrated edge and one straight edge that meet to form an ever so slightly concave point. Strapped to a belt, from a distance, it looks like a particularly stout and vicious hunting knife (and in fact, I have received more than one suspicious glance from innocent bystanders who must have thought me some kind of half gardener/half military assassin run amok in their neighborhood). It is sold as a "weeding tool", a task to which it is admirably suited but which label does no more justice than selling a modern computer as a "Tetris-playing tool".
In the interests of not publishing an encyclopedic dissertation in one blog post, I will not attempt to enumerate the sundry uses for the Hori Hori all at once, but will rather christen a new installation at Callus and Chlorophyll which will eulogize and regularly explore the applications of my beloved knife gone astray, to be entitled: "Hori Hori R.I.P".
Stay tuned for more.