Wheelbarrow screener: sifting soil or compost is easier with this two-piece screener that fits into a wheelbarrow

This Gardening Tool puts screened soil and compost exactly where you need it - in your wheelbarrow. The screener has two parts: the base that fits securely over the tray of the wheelbarrow, and a shallow screener box that slides along the base. Screener boxes can be built for various uses, from a 1/4-inch mesh for fine sifting to a 2-inch inch for coarser work.

The idea evolved innocently enough from a conversation last summer with a friend named Caroline. She and her young family had recently moved into a stately old house whose gardens were in even worse shape than the gutters. All summer long the yard was in an uproar. One day, during a lull in the landscaping. I noticed a rusty old wheelbarrow filled with bushy heads of green and red leaf lettuce. The vegetable garden, it seems, was being dug up to make way for the pool.Truth told, Bud took the concept of lettuce in a wheelbarrow a whole lot more seriously than Caroline and I had. Bud's idea was to create a gourmet salad bar on wheels. Like Caroline, he considered portability a key benefit of this mobile propagation technique, although he used the wheelbarrow to roll his tender crops out of the harsh afternoon sun rather than into it. To foil slugs, he parked the wheelbarrow in a slightly different spot in the Sunset test garden each night. Gophers? No problem here, he announced with a smile. Drainage? Rust had taken care of that. And Bud knew that the short root systems of lettuces and similar plants lent themselves perfectly to the average wheelbarrow's shallow dimensions.COMPOST BINS ARE a free source of the best organic material for your garden beds. Just toss in garden clippings and kitchen scraps, and soon you'll have nutrition-rich plant food. However, to get top-quality compost, you need to separate twigs, rocks, and undecomposed vegetable matter from the good stuff.Next construct the screener box out of four lengths of 2x4 lumber. Make sure the screener box is wider than the base by at least 3 inches. This width will allow you to rest the screener box on the base as you move it back and forth while screening soil. Notch the lumber to create handles, as shown in the technical drawing.Enter Bud Stuckey, Sunset's resident horticulturist and ace gardener. Bud quickly got into the spirit of things. He filled a beat-up wheelbarrow with potting soil and compost fertilized with fish emulsion, then planted it with various kinds of lettuces as well as endive, parsley, nasturtium, basil, and chives.Sand the wood surfaces and seal the frame and tray with polyurethane. The final step is to rub a candle on the bottom of the tray and the tops of the frame's 1-by-1s so the tray slides easily.

You can use the screener to mix potting soil, then pot plants directly from the wheelbarrow. Soil or compost screened into the wheelbarrow is also easy to transport to another location.

Author: Andrew Malik