I tore my ACL while operating a small 35 property lawn and garden maintenance business 15 years ago. The first few weeks I was on crutches leaf blower in hand. Thank god for friends pitching in to man th mowers, tillers and wheelbarrows. Since then I have found that adjusting the weight onto the supporting knee helps. You can't rely on that for ever though as it wears the supporting knee out faster. It is tough until the flexability comes back over time really. I still feel the effects 15 yrs later. I still watch over extension when driving a shovel into the ground. You will know it if it hyperextends. The best thing to do is work on strenghtening the surrounding muscles with physio. There are carts you can design to aid you when weeding(check out some ceative ones on you tube!) Good luck with the rehab and above all don't over do it!

Hi Carol Ann, Your club sounds exciting and fun, is it open to folks living in Carrollton too? I would love to join, please let me know ok, thanks! Marci

Ezzirah, I don't have any first-hand advice for you since I don't have real joint issues yet--just the aches and creaking joints that comes a bit as you get older, but I have a friend who has had back surgery as well as knee and hip issues, and he has had to change some of his gardening practices accordingly. He plants tomatoes in molasses feed tubs (round muck buckets from Wal-Mart or TSC with rope handles are about the same size) that have been placed on top of a bench and a table so he can plant, weed, water and harvest while standing almost completely upright. (The tubs on the bench are a bit lower, obviously, than the ones on the picnic table. When working with those, he can pull up a lawn chair and sit down by the bench and work from a seated position.) Another way to raise some veggies without a lot of bending and stooping is to build a salad table. You can grow a lot in a salad table, and not just salad greens, but radishes and small round carrots like Thumbelina or Paris Market, for example, or even some smaller, more compact varieties of herbs. The first salad table I ever saw was in an article that featured info from the University of Maryland, so I will link some info from the U of M so you can see what one looks like. Some people with mobility issues build a larger, deeper version of a salad table that allows them to grow almost any plants they choose at roughly their waist level. These are box gardens placed on wooden posts used as legs to raise them up high enough that the gardener doesn't have to get down on the ground or bend over a lot. I am pretty sure you can see an example of one of these on the website of Gardener's Supply.I think it would be pretty easy to build your own. I grow lettuce in a cattle feed trough that we bought at TSC last year. It is raised a couple of feet off the ground, and the part that holds the soil is about 9 or 10" deep. I raised huge lettuce crops in it last spring, followed by bush lima beans in the summer. There's not much work involved once you have it filled with soil. I planted, watered and harvested, and rarely had to even pluck out any weeds since it is raised above the ground. This winter, I've pulled out 3 or 4 weeds that have sprouted in it, probably from windborne seed. A person could work a cattle trough garden by standing and bending over, or by pulling up a lawn chair and sitting. I hope to add another trough garden this year. Originally I was going to build a salad table, but then I saw the cattle trough and thought it would serve the same purpose. Window boxes can be used to grow edible plants too. I have window boxes on the 5 chicken coop windows and even my garden shed windows. They are great for herbs, edible flowers like nasturtiums or violets, and many kinds of greens, carrots, radishes or ornamental flowers. You even can grow very small dwarf tomato plants in them. If your knee issues make it too hard to get up and down from the ground, you can use the various types of elevated containers I mentioned to continue to garden while letting your knee heal from the surgery, if the surgery is necessary. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Univ of Maryland's Salad Table

I think I mentioned earlier that I got whacked with CIDP, which is MS except it hits the peripheral, not the central nervous system - so my legs below the knees, left hand, and face are paralyzed. Some of the facial nerves fused together, so when I salivate, I cry and this can be confusing to the wait staff in a restaurant when I start crying into the soup.... Anyway, do the same thing Steve does with a long handed cultivator - a 6 ft handle on a stirrup hoe. I also have a sawn off shovel handle that I tie to my waist with a rope for fishing - lean into it for the tripod effect. I really like the garden kneeler, its light weight and easy to move around, and I can get up and down easily from the kneeling position - it just doesn't work on the slopes I have to deal with, where it is pretty difficult to get it level. Today I started pruning fruit trees down to the level I can reach them, and I have discovered that getting a tripod fruit ladder is high on Santa's list. The standard, folding paint ladder is going to get me one of these days.