A HANDMADE SIFTER FOR THE GARDEN

We thankfully worked with Sontec Plumbing. They were great. Recommended: 0409 695 927

As I have mentioned here, there are things happening in our backyard this year and we are excited about it all as a family. There will be other posts on other aspects of what is going on there and what we have done or learnt throughout this process. Today, here is one of Mr. Hubby's ideas and our handmade tool that worked wonderfully for us.

As you know from my previous post on our garden that we have some stones and rocks on the sides of our backyard along with the fence and we wanted/needed to take them off from there and use them elsewhere. There were four reasons for that: 1) We need to dig up some parts of the garden and the stones are very hard to work with when doing so. 2) Where we are planning to dig up the soil, stones are unneeded and are not welcome. 3) We need all those rocks and stones elsewhere. 4)We have enquired about some walk in bins to take all that dirt away from quite a few places and the quotes for a 6-8 cubic meters walk in bin started from approximately $300 and went up to around $600 which too made us think of other possible options.

Mr. Hubby is a person with bright ideas and can think outside the box. He is skillful too which is a great advantage on our behalf. He started thinking of possible solutions (can you tell he is an engineer?) and voila! This is what we did on the same day after he suggested it:

We bought a metal mesh for about $20 from a local hardware store. We came home and got working. We picked some pieces of wood that would work well for our little project from our little 'unwanted-for-the-moment' wood pile, took our drill set and some nails out out, and started to make our rectangle metal sifter. We kept one side's two wood ends a bit longer to make it easier to lift it up when heavy.

We placed the sifter on top of the wheelbarrow that we have borrowed from a family member (which we should really give back sometime soon).

The rest was pretty straight forward. We loaded the sifter with dirt using a shovel, sifted it through our handmade sifter, most of the soil and some small sized beneficial rocks went through and went into the wheelbarrow, we separated the big chunks of branches, twigs and grass roots and the rest stayed on the sifter which we then poured into buckets to make it easier to transport.

During this work which went for over a week on and off, Mr. Junior was very helpful finding all sorts of bugs and worms and informing us of his new findings. As a person who would not go to his Grandparents' house unless they make sure that their pet dogs are locked away or on leash, he did really well with bugs and all those slimy little creatures!

As for Miss Junior, she helped us out with the rocks the most by making sure that we did not miss any unwanted bits in the rocks section. She was an excellent supervisor and a worker. She inspected the rocks that we collected in a container in detail and whenever she didn't like it, she took them out of the container and put them on the ground so that we would know we needed to do it again, this time, more carefully.

Once again, it was hard work but was well accomplished and we surely had a smile on our face when it was all completed.

We even found some surprises in the garden where they were least expected!