By Rita R. Robison
This week, I loved winning a gift certificate, while I
struggled with lawn edging from Home Depot.
My best consumer experience: Winning a $25 gift certificate
at a local winery
I won a $25 gift certificate to winery of my choice on South
Sound Wine Trail. I won it in a weekly drawing of the Olympia – Lacey – Tumwater Visitor and Convention Bureau.
I didn’t know we had any wineries locally. I look forward to
learning about one, tasting its wines, and selecting a bottle or two of wine.
One of the wineries, Madsen Family Cellars, writes in a blog post about crushing grapes for this season's wines.
My worst consumer experience: Lawn edging from Home Depot
Since I went on a vacation this spring, the weeds in my yard
got ahead of me.
At Home Depot, I asked which lawn edging would be the best
to keep the lawn from growing into my beds and around my raised bed garden.
The sales associate recommended a fiberglass product and a
green plastic one with sharp scallop-shaped points. He said the one with the
sharp points could be pounded into the ground. No so. It didn’t work. However,
I dug a trench and was able to use it that way.
On the other hand, the fiberglass edging was a total
disaster. The package warned it was compressed and to watch out when you opened
it. So, at least, I didn’t injure myself when I cut off the binders, and it
sprang out with a lot of force into a bigger circle.
The problem I had was there wasn’t any way to cut it. It was
a 20-foot piece. I needed 12 feet on one side of my raised bed garden and 6
feet on the other side.
I took the fiberglass edging back and bought the typical
black plastic type.
I wish the sales associate had told me you couldn’t cut the
fiberglass edging. I wasted a lot of time trying to get it to work.
