How can I store my garden tools without them getting rusty over the winter?

– Brad L, Internet

My wife likes to plant flowers in our yard and she has a good number of small gardening tools. Many of these tools quickly become dented and scratched from working the soil and if you do not take good care of them rust will set in.

What she has taken to doing is getting a few small buckets and filling them with sandbox sand. This is the white sand you would buy to fill a sandbox for your kid to play in and is sometimes called beach sand. It is important to let the sand dry out before use.

After filling a five gallon bucket without about 4 gallons of sand she takes some of my used motor oil and pours it in to make a nice sand-oil mixture. You do not want the oil to be above the sand but you do want it to mix in very well. I think about four quarts per bucket is what she uses.

What you now have is a bucket that you can stick your small tools into to give them a nice coating of oil. This oil should be good enough to protect them through the winter.

If you only have a few tools you could leave them in the sand but my wife uses the bucket to dip the tool in and out several times to give it a good coat of oil and then lets it hang over the bucket while any excess oil and sand drip off. She then hangs the tools up in the shed.

You can use a rag to wipe off the sand before hanging just be sure to leave enough oil to properly protect the metal surfaces of the tool.

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Garden Tools used under Creative Commons License from flickr user judomaster

What is the correct amount to tip when eating out?

– Allen D. Internet

Many people in the USA are confused by tipping.

Do you tip no matter what?

Do you deduct for bad service or food?

Do you tip extra for fast service?

The problem with tipping in the USA is that restaurant owners pay their wait staff less than minimum wage and rely on the customer to pay the difference. This may work in theory but the restaurant owner should just charge more for the food and pay their staff a decent wage.

Another problem with tipping is that the only thing the wait staff is doing is bringing you the food from the kitchen. If the food is crap and you leave a smaller tip you are punishing the wait staff for a problem caused by the cook.

Some restaurants even enforce a tip on large parties. More than eighth people at your table? Then you get to pay a built-in gratuity! The problem with the built-in gratuity is that it limits the amount of the tip because no one is going to leave a bigger tip after they have been forced to leave a tip! It gets even worse when the gratuity is built-in and they don’t tell the customer…

So what do you do?

I follow a basic system of 20% for good service and good food. If the food is bad I tell the waiter and see how they respond. If they remove the price of the food from my bill or otherwise compensate me I still figure my tip as if I had paid for that food.

If service is crap then I only leave between 5 and 10%. If service is stellar than I go as high as 30%.

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Please Pass The Lettuce used under Creative Commons License from flickr user Sister72