The only idea I've had lately is to STOP buying more roses! After pruning for three long days I decided that I must be nuts to want more! LOL! Your idea certainly sounds clever and i'll have to try it the next time I spray when it's windy. Sorry I can't seem to come up with any scathingly brilliant ideas right now...

April

Dont know how clever this is but it sure has worked well. I was thumbing thru a garden magazine at Lowes Saturday and found this tip, and then bought what I needed right there. The tip was.....buy a hanging shoe rack [that hangs on the back of a door] with pockets. You can put lots of your small gardening aids there and they will be easy to find. Works like a charm! I hung it on the back of a door in my horse barn - I have flower beds all around the barn and am always dragging gardening stuff in there. The neatest thing is that I put my pruning shears there - now I always know where to find them! I'm sure I will find many other things to put there, but so far I have put plastic twist ties for tieing canes, labels/china pen, twine, seed packets, trowels. Previously, I had just put these things on a shelf where they piled up and were messy. The pockets are see through so I can just grab what I want. The main thing is to remember to put the stuff back!

Here's another - I am really bad about buying more roses than I have beds ready to plant them in. Like, really bad! Consequently, I have a pot ghetto that looks like a rose nursery. Realizing I cant get beds done as fast as I can buy roses........I decided to repot the roses in really good soil with ammendments in the bottom of the pot, mulch it and set the pot where I think I might ultimately like to plant the rose. When I get the bed finished, I can then plant the rose and it does not have to sit in the cramped pot it came in and suffer - it can begin to grow, get fertilized and yes!....perhaps bloom! I cant say how well this is going to work [but really, how could it not??] but it is making me feel more organized about my ghetto and getting alot of the roses at least parked on their future piece of real estate. And I just bought, at Walmart, a nifty metal shelf for $30 that will be perfect to put my potted bands on - lots of space between the 4 shelves for roses to grow, and the shelves are made of heavy duty wire so light comes through. This keeps the roses neater [4 stories high]. If this works out well....I will buy more shelves. [Note I did not say buy more roses - that should be understood!]

What a great thread! Cant wait to hear more ideas!
Judith

This is not in the least clever since I didn't think of it myself (was inspired by an article on the Vintage Gardens web site) but I didn't prune my 85 (mostly antique) roses AT ALL. What a time saver!

Alameda, I'm very interested in your Wallyworld shelves; I need some too. But, oh, there is just no hope of remembering to put small objects in the shoe bag...I've decided that there is a physical gap between my brain and my hands. My mind has NO IDEA what my hands have done with anything. The only wispy hope of finding items is if I say OUT LOUD "I am putting my keys on the sofa"....or whatever. People look at me very very strangely. Luckily rosebushes are hard to lose.

The Wally shelves are metal [comes in black and silver] and are those "resturant grade" gridiron ones. I like them because there there is lots of room for the roses - most shelves dont have the headroom a rose would need. Supposedly they go together in 20 minutes. That would probably be if my boyfriend will put them together.....with me doing it - half a day! Cant wait to get them up! I, too, read the Vintage article and am pruning everything less this year......
Judith

Laura, I am with you on the gap between head and hands. I can now lose things in less than three seconds -- I'm kind of impressed with myself, but not in a good way!

The last time I lost my keys, thank doG, my Border Collie remembered the "find the keys" game we played when she was a puppy and found them for me in about 10 seconds. I was still wandering around in a daze, wondering where in ten feet of walking I had put them down....

-Greta

P.S. Clever ideas... nope, sorry! (Unless you want to teach your dog to find your keys!)

Here's one that a friend told me this fall. I was heading out to Round-up the paths in the rose field to get rid of the little winter annuals (before they turned into big winter annuals) With the roses right there beside the paths, it always takes me quite a while to carefully spray all the weeds.

He told me to use a paint roller and roll the chemical on the weeds. Brilliant! I mixed the Round-up in a drywall bucket, used one of those painter screens that's made for buckets to roll the excess off the roller, and I 'painted' the paths. No spraying involved, so there's no over-spray.

Connie

A Border Collie would find keys. A Samoyed simply gives you a blank look and then demands a tummy rub, since you are standing around doing nothing to make his life better at the moment.

I'm not very clever. How about this, I save one of the plastic laundry detergent bottles, the kind with the handle, and cut the top off at a angle, and use that as a scoop for potting soil, alfalfa meal, compost, etc. Then when it starts getting brittle I can rinse it out and recycle it as normal.

shelves for the greenhouse, scoop for the fertilizer, paint roller for roundup---I'm three times smarter than I was before I asked!

I'm sure every one has heard this one but, if you have weeds or grass growing too close to a plant to spray weed poison on it, pour some weed killer in a cup and use a cheap paint brush and just paint it on the weeds.

Hoov, well, you have a point. OTOH, except for the grooming, I bet your Sammy is an easier dog to live with. When I don't give the BC keys to find, she "finds" anything on the counters, unpacks bags and backpacks, and sends stealth emails to her Border Collie friends.

I am going to use the fertilizer scoop idea. Good thread!

A lot of the high-priced coffee joints around here re-package their grounds and have them available for gardeners to pick up for use in the garden. They are GREAT for the compost pile--those fine grounds really get things cooking in a hurry. They're free and it keeps the coffee ground out of the landfills. Plus they make your compost smell really good!

Okay, I've finally thought of one! Alas, I didn't invent this one either. For getting rid of those pesky weeds in the cracks of your driveway or patio, put white vinegar in a spray bottle and spray the little darlings. They will be stone dead by the next day. No poisons, very little money, and great satisfaction.

Ingrid

I just remembered of another good idea..not mine but it's a good one. Keep a ziplock bag handy to put your gardening gloves in. It keeps critters from crawling inside. I remembered that one after I put my gloves on and got a nastly bite for my troubles!

Ziplock bag for gloves! Now why didn't I think of that! I always cringe when I have to put on my gardening gloves after not using them in a long while for fear of what might have crawled in there. So many good ideas here. Thanks for all of them. FYI, cocker spaniels are not key finders either.

You could teach that cocker spaniel to find keys! But it does take some training.

I think cockers are the perfect dogs for people who like to prune roses. You constantly have to prune cockers, too!

-Greta

I want a spreadsheet to manage all the roses I see from all the different catalogs/vendors that I like so I know which vendors to buy what from. It should include ownroot/grafted, size, rootstock, shipping, handling, tax, etc.

Can you imagine what we all could do with such a tool???

GREAT idea about the keys. Might work better for those with dogs that don't work free to have some sort of fob that smells like bacon!

That's a good idea about keeping the gloves in a ziplock bag. I get spider bites all the time from that.

Two great helps my husband thought of for me - he attached a mailbox to my potting bench - I keep my garden gloves, pruners, etc. right out in the garden but high and dry. They're always there when I need them. He also took an old hand-push golf cart, removed the golf club bag, and attached a plastic bucket in its place with a bungee cord. He put one of those cool bucket liners with the outside pockets all the way around on the bucket. Now I have a Mobile Garden Unit (MGU) ready for action at all times! I keep extra pruners, nylon ties, cell phone, extra garden gloves, etc. in the outside bucket pockets, and my kneeling pad, larger tools, shovel, etc. in the bucket itself. It wheels easily all over the garden, and then right into the garage for the night. Lord, I love that man!

I always turn my gloves inside out before I put them on for fear there's a spider in there. It's a real pain to do and the zip bag is so easy! DUH! Going to try that vinegar trick too. Having had it end up on my roses before, I'm terrified of Round-Up so I usually end up pulling them out on my hands and knees instead. Hmmm...seems to me there's an old golf cart in the basement.... Great tips here everyone, thanks! I wish I had something clever to add. I feel bad.

Some good ideas here - keep 'em coming!

Regarding the vinegar for weed kill....how close to a rose bush can you do this? I have one bed that is the bane of my existence! I do the newspaper trick under mulch, and while it works for a few weeks, my weeds are so aggressive they start growing right through it! And before you say it, I use lots and lots of layers. So far I've been hand pulling on my hands and knees in that bed, which is quite a chore, crawling around in there, getting thorns poked in my head and everywhere else. I'd really like to try the vinegar - do you use it straight, or diluted, and if diluted, at what percentage? Can I use it right up to the base of the rose, or should I establish a perimeter? Please comment, any and all, as this could be a HUGE help. (I guess even our weeds are bigger.......)

Thanks,
Margaret

This is the right time of year for this one--
ask any accounting firm for their bags of shredded tax returns. It makes great mulch. I have to put dirt or something heavy on it in our wind, but it also decomposes well in the composter. Businesses that don't pay a shredding company will have bags of shredded paper ready to go into the dumpster, free for the asking.
Also...I found a baby jogger (like a golf push cart) at a garage sale and we modified it to hold tools and plants. It's very easy to push around the yard.
I use the shoe pocket holder for gloves. When gloves are wet, I stick them on a stake in a flower pot near the door to dry. Looks like I'm giving a friendly wave from inside the flower pot. The best stakes are wire supports from a peony ring because they can reach clear up into the finger.
I use plastic recipe or file card boxes to store my seed packets--keeps insects and mice out. Learned that one the hard way.
Lastly, I use Excel spreadsheet to keep track of plants and wishes and wants. I can attach a photo to each name, and sort by name, price, beds, sellers, etc.

I need methods to keep bermuda grass out of flower beds, like Margaret.
cindi
oh==my labradors are great at finding keys, shoes and gloves. They just expect to go along with me if they help, and I feel like a creep when I take the keys and leave them behind. My labs are so smart they check my work. I plant bulbs and they have to dig to see if I did indeed plant them right side up.

Lowes' sells an auger for planting tulips, this fits on your electric drill. I had my husband knock off the mental stop on the auger so I can drill as deep as I want. My drill has a reverse, so if you get stuck you can just put it in reverse and back the auger bit out. This save lots of time and your back when you have lots to plant. This is my favorite tool in the garden.

I got this clever idea from this forum, and it has really helped. I put saucers under all my potted roses to soak up the water after it runs through the holes, and the water slowly sucks up into the soil from the saucer. There were some roses that I just could not wet the soil well enough, and now they are thriving. Thank you to whoever posted that tip. I got a few more great tips today.