Don’t let your client hang up that hoe!
Don’t let your client hang up that hoe!
Simple tools make gardening a joy again
Summer is the growing season. Gardening — planting things and having the satisfaction of watching them grow — can be therapeutic. Yet the thought of the deep knee bends and back-breaking stooping necessary to plant and weed causes many older adults and people with physical challenges to give up on gardening.
"With appropriate tools to assist or compensate for disabilities, gardening can be rewarding and provide good exercise for even people with very limited mobility," says Andrea Tannenbaum, president of Dynamic Living in West Hartford, CT. "There are alternatives to traditional gardening methods and tools that make gardening easier and certainly a lot more accessible."
Tannenbaum started her on-line catalog company, www.dynamic-living.com, out of necessity to help her mother, who lives with Parkinson’s disease. "I’m not a therapist or a health care professional of any kind. My only experience is with my own family and my customers. I don’t encourage people to try new things without the approval or their physician or therapist. I don’t claim to have all the solutions."
What Tannenbaum does claim to do is find the hard-to-find and stretch her imagination to solve her customers’ special needs. "Case managers know, and I know from the case managers I work with, that each individual client has specific needs. What works for the majority may not work for some. When a client contacts us with a particular need, we ask questions and listen carefully. We carry a wide range of special products, but sometimes the real solution can be purchased from the local Kmart."
Her suggestions for accessible gardening are a perfect example of creative problem-solving.
• Container gardening. "Most people think of windowsill planters and large pots that sit on the porch or patio when they think about container gardening," notes Tannenbaum. "Suggest that your clients make a gardening table, or a terrarium, or a dish garden. These things can be placed or built to waist-height to make them more accessible to clients in wheelchairs. And you don’t have to rule out a traditional flower bed. A landscaper can build up a flower bed with railroad ties to place it at a more accessible height."
• Selecting the right tools. "Lightweight hand tools are the best choice for people with weak or limited hand use," Tannenbaum says. Case managers should recommend that clients always wear gardening gloves for additional cushioning, she adds. Simple adjustments help make your client’s gardening tools even more comfortable. "If you insert tool handles into the foam rubber used for pipe insulation, they are more comfortable to hold. The foam rubber comes pre-slit for easy insertion and it only costs about $1.50 for enough insulation to cover the handles of 10 or 12 tools."
Even clients with limited grasp can still enjoy gardening, she notes. "People with a very limited grasp can attach small gardening tools to their wrists and forearms with splints or long Velcro strips." Long-handled spades, shovels or pruners are ideal for working in a raised flower bed. "These tools extend your client’s reach, but they also enable greater leverage to the task and require less bending," says Tannenbaum.
She carries several products that work well for single-handed gardeners. "There is a pruning stick that can be tucked under the arm or guided by the leg to enable single-handed gardeners to maneuver the cutter for ground work."
Case managers or their clients who are not on-line but still want help finding a product to fit a special need can call the company (see editor’s note). "It’s a free service. We don’t mind giving advice. Sometimes we tell people that they can buy the product at their local hardware store rather than from us. Sometimes we find a product and the client ends up buying it from someone else. I started this business to help people like my mother, who wanted to live a fuller life and didn’t like the institutional-looking products offered to help her modify her home. Many disabled people, including my mother, don’t consider themselves disabled — just challenged."
[Editor’s note: Dynamic Living can be reached at (888) 940-0605.]
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