garden junk

last night i flipped through mary randolph carter’s “garden junk” book for inspiration. it’s full of beautiful photos with tons of creative ideas for exterior decorating.

seeing all the lovely rusty garden décor put me in the mood for junking, so today i went to antique world mall. it’s part antique store, part thrift shop, part junk yard, part museum, and similar in size to a big box store. there are over a hundred dealers. some have ridiculously low prices, others have ridiculously high prices, most are reasonable, and it averages out to just slightly higher than thrift store prices.

it’s a great place to just wander around for hours and be fascinated. i spent two hours there today and probably saw only half of it; i doubt i processed more than a quarter of what i laid eyes on.

somehow i always find exactly what i’m looking for when i go to antique world. not sure if that’s a function of me being extremely lucky or of the store being enormous and stuffed to the brim with goodies or both. i had a very specific item in mind today, something that caught my eye in the garden junk book, these metal flower carts:

and what did i find?

pretty perfect, right? it was meant to be. i love that the wheels work, so i can load it with container plants and use it to chase the sun around the yard.

i also went looking for rusted old garden tools:

a funky watering can:

a vintage malibu barbie bike:

kidding about the bike, that was an impulse buy...but i was looking for an old scale, to use as a plant stand and eventually to weigh my veggies so i can record yields:

there were probably a dozen beautiful old scales scattered throughout the store. most of them cost more than i wanted to pay, and a lot of them didn’t work very well. this one is very accurate, cute, and was on “scale sale” for half price.

i *would* have paid over twice as much for this awesome scale, except that it’s unreadable; all the numbers have worn off along with most of the increment marks:

i found some other garden junk at thrift stores, like this old glass milk bottle made in italy:

a “food umbrella” that i’ll use to keep birds and insects away from certain plants if anything starts to get attacked:

and a small kettle, repro-vintage coats & clark tin, yellow pitcher, and sun bonnet, all but the latter to use as planters:

the people who work at antique world mall are so very sweet. they were kind enough to let me take photos; here are some of the things that caught my eye.

^i had to look up a term found on the labels of these bottles, “eructations”--turns out to be a marvelously fancy word for burping. “oh pardon, i eructated.”

i love photographing display heads. since i can’t help but think of garden-y applications for everything right now, wouldn’t it be cool to find a display head with no hair, hollow it out from the top and use it as a planter for some crazy fern or something?

a boy, a cart, a massive chicken. what about that image doesn't scream "root beer"?