
The suburbanites and rural dwellers among you probably realize that your home-maintenance problems are foreign to us city dwellers. You have raccoons going through your garbage, we have winos and identity thieves going through ours. Also, you guys have yards to maintain; our version of yardwork is plucking scattered take-out menus off the floors of our building vestibules.
One problem that's news to me: Apparently, those of you with yards ringed by oak trees need to undertake acorn and pine cone removal. I'd never heard of this before until I saw the tools pictured up above, designed by a charmingly-named company called Garden Weasel. Their functions aren't obvious from looking at still shots of them, so check this out:
I don't quite know what to make of these since I've never had to perform those tasks. Still, I'd like Garden Weasel to set up an urban subsidiary—Apartment Building Weasel?—that adapts these for picking up take-out menus.
Comments
I have a big, beautiful live oak in my front yard. It drops oodles of acorns onto my lawn each winter. I it a real bear to try to rake them out of the grass. I would be interested in trying this tool, but it looks like it covers only a very small area with each pass. I wonder if in the end it would really save time.
Garden weasel has been around for decades, by the way. I remember watching their TV commercials in the '70s.
Actually, picking up acorns is a real drag. We have a very big oak tree that drops thousands, maybe millions and the squirrels and chipmunks can only put so many way. I rake and blow them but one of these might be useful. Then again, maybe not. I'm tempted to relate these to vegamatics and pocket fishermen...