Mohammed in the garden

My Somali friend, Mohammed, lives nearby in an apartment and loves to garden. He came over after supper tonight to help me dig.
My wonderful garden is overgrown and worn out. The penny royal - which came from I don't know where - is nearly choking out the asparagus and the creeping thyme has overtaken the rest of the garden, including the stepping stones. Oh, the Joe Pye weed will do fine, and so will the yarrow and the rose bush. The monk's hood is robust, but so are the dandelions. Mohammed and I need space for tomatoes, hot peppers and snap peas, so there's a lot of clearing that needs to happen.

I brought out my tools, a garden fork and long-handled shovel. He tried out both but was dissatisfied. I brought out a rake. This was better, but what he really needed was a jembe. He raised his arms over his head, bringing an imaginary jembe down in the rampant penny royal. It would dig into the soil and cut off the weeds.

I saw people using jembes when I was in Kenya in 1995. Mohammed spent his teen years there. It's a most useful tool, a type of hoe, sturdier than what we use here. But I thought we might find one, so we climbed into Mohammed's truck and went off to Menard's in search of a jembe. After all, it's a hoe, surely Menard's garden center would have one.

Menard's had hoes and they looked okay to me, but I don't know my jembes, not even after a trip to Kenya. Mohammed inspected the hoes. They had dull edges; a jembe has a sharp edge, to cut the weeds. I suggested Gerten's Garden Center. Unlike Menard's which sells hoes along with toilets, hex wrenches, carpets, dog food and light fixtures, Gerten's is entirely for the garden.

At Gerten's, Mohammed was dazzled by baskets heaped with blooming flowers, small trees with roots bound in burlap, ceramic pots the size of bathtubs. But not a serious hoe to be found. In fact, they don't have many tools in stock and the hoes they sold all had the same dull edges. Even I could see the metal was cheap.

It was striking to me, the absence of a tool that is used to feed a family in the undeveloped countries; a tool so simple to make well, but unavailable in all the abundance found in two of our famous megastores.