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Home Depot versus Lowes
Wednesday, April 18 2012
It was cool and mostly cloudy today, but there was still no rain. It's shaping up to be the dryest April in memory. It's supposed to be April showers that bring May flowers. Evidently March flowers bring April drought.
This afternoon I drove out to Kingston's crappiest commercial district, the one populated by a Lowes, a Home Depot, and a mall, partially because I needed garden supplies, and Herzog's garden center has yet to really boot up for the season. At Home Depot I easily found a cheap bag of humus with manure, but I was also looking for small pots for starting seedlings and they didn't sell those. (I've been using catfood cans, but later when I need to repot the plant I have to cut the can apart with tin snips.) They also had a surprisingly poor selection of small metric machine screws and bolts, carrying none of the M3 size used extensively in the Makerbot Thingomatic. Over at Lowes they did have bolts that size, but with the wrong-shaped heads (meanwhile, I know for certain that Herzog stocks bolts of this size with the head shape I am seeking). While Lowes didn't have small garden pots, they sold a grid of tiny starter compartments suitable for a couple weeks of initial growth. I also needed some sort of organizer for my dozens of seed packets (and it doesn't appear that Home Depot even has a storage solution aisle, whereas Lowes does). I'd never before done such an apples-to-apples comparison of Home Depot and Lowes, assuming that they're just about identical. It turns out they do have strong differences when it comes to the details of what they stock.
On the drive home I mined another forty gallons of topsoil on the east bank of the Esopus. Though I'd only brought seven buckets with me, I managed to find an eighth "drift bucket" left behind by the floods of last hurricane season. Normally the dogs go off and explore as I'm gathering my dirt, but today they were far too obsessed with the rawhide bones I'd bought them. For her part, Ramona is never satisfied with the rawhide bone she happens to have. She seems to assume she's being short changed if anyone else is happily chewing.
The new dirt went into my northernmost tomato patch, whose elevation will be about six inches higher than it was last year. I'd managed to find some good long sticks of bluestone with which to increase the height of its retaining wall. This probably won't make the garden any better, but it will make our yard look a little more like it contains the ruins of an ancient castle.
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