Springtime means gardens are being planted and farmers markets are in full force. Don’t get caught without your Hod basket!
Wait, what is a Hod basket you say? Only one of the greatest carrying contraptions around! Let me back up….
Have you ever dug clams? If you are from Maine chances are you have or you know someone who has. It’s a lot of work! You have to dig down into the mud flats in your thigh-high boots and your super-long gloves hoping that your fingers will find the shells protecting those delicious creatures of the sea. If you’re lucky you’ll be able to gather a peck of them but they’ll be covered in all that mud. Clams need to be purged, to get rid of as much of the sand as possible before they are ready for cooking.
The Hod basket was created for just this. It is a wooden handled, wire basket (wire similar to lobster trap wire) that comes in two sizes – Small, which holds one peck of clams, and Large, which holds two pecks. Clam diggers fill their Hod baskets and then purge their clams right in them by running clean water through the clams and letting the sandy water run out the bottom of the basket. That’s yankee ingenuity at it’s finest!
Now maybe you don’t dig for clams on the regular but if you have a vegetable garden, these baskets are invaluable. No one likes to track in soil from the garden into their kitchen. Use your Hod basket by filling it with your freshly picked garden-fresh goodies and letting all the loose soil fall out the bottom. Then before you even go inside, rinse them off with your hose and voila – freshly picked, freshly cleaned vegetables all in a convenient basket, ready to go inside.
We’ve had rave reviews for these Hod baskets from customers and many have found a multiple of uses for them. Collect kindling for a fire, store magazines or toilet paper in your bathroom, keep your potatoes from rolling around in your pantry by storing them in the basket for easy retrieval, catch your mail as it comes into the house, or even starting seedlings inside to be transferred outside. The uses are innumerable.
Do you have a Hod basket? What do you use it for?