Every week during the Lockdown, W Yorks HPS member Kathy Howard will produce a horticultural quiz to keep our minds fresh. The answers (no cheating please!) will be published alongside the following week’s quiz questions.

For answers to Quiz eleven, click here

This week we have Gardening Gadgets – true or false?

Below are ten gardening gadgets from past and/or present. Six are genuine, four I have made up… Can you tell which is which?

1. Hori hori : A multipurpose gardening knife. The word hori means “to dig” in Japanese and “hori-hori” is the onomatopoeic representation of a digging sound. 

2. Grape storage bottle: To impress by serving out of season, Victorians stored grapes in glass bottles which were filled with charcoal and water

3. Cucumber straightener: a glass tube used to make cucumbers more aesthetically pleasing

4. Vine weevil crock:  shallow pots often made of thick terracotta to which compost, weed roots and sulphur can be added to tempt those unwelcome pests

5. Dusting bellows: These were used in the18th century to disperse powdered insecticide

6. Thistle spud: used for cutting out thistles, some had ornate blades shaped as thistles

7. Giraffe hoes: extendable tool used by early Victorians to retrieve weeds from herbaceous borders without treading on precious plants

8. Dutch grubber: particularly useful for rooting out annual weeds, this tool head resembles the sails of windmills 

9. Thatcher’s Wimble: Known also as Wimbrels, or Scud Winders in Suffolk,  used to make straw string 

10. Thin gumajig: widely popular labelling and naming device, cheaper and less time consuming than Victorian ceramic, steel or glass systems