With having to use a wheelbarrow to haul things from the basement to the barn, one of the things I really wanted to do this pay period was pick up a utility wagon of some kind.

Yesterday, at Costco, I found one. Today, I got to break it in!

Ideally, I would have picked up one of the types with rigid metal mesh sides and bottom, with removable sides. They cost about $250, though, which was not in the budget this month. Instead, I picked up a folding version with fabric lining, which has almost the same dimensions as the metal version I was looking at.

While I ran into town to run errands, the girls assembled it and left it waiting for me in the garage, so I could test it out.

It folds up to a nice, compact size, and it quite light.

It isn’t visible in this photo, but there is a loop in the middle of the wagon to pull on to fold it up again. On the handle, near the frame, is a lever that lets you adjust the handle length. In the first photo, you can see a red button on one side of the handle. That is the release button to unlock the handle for use.

I picked up a lot of larger, heavier things while running errands. One of the reasons I chose this specific wagon is because it’s rated to 300 pounds. Normally, I would have had to drive into the yard and unload at the house. Instead…

… I got almost everything in the wagon!

I did have to use the neck of one of the two 18L water bottles to hang bags off of, and had one last bag I needed to carry, but I was able to get everything from the van to the house in one trip. This included a 20kg (44 pounds) bag of bird seed and, along with the big water bottles, a couple of gallons of distilled water for my husband’s CPAP humidifier, and a 12 pk of cola, on top of everything else.

It did a great job of rolling all that over the rough ground to the yard; only the one Amazon box ended up falling off part way through.

This would have made hauling all that stuff to the barn SO much easier! We’re going to get a lot of use out of this.

Because it is fabric sided, though, we plan to cut a board to fit on the bottom. One of the things we expect to use it for is to roll 5 gallon buckets of water around the garden, once we start transplanting things. Having a “floor” will be a help with that.

Oh, and the Amazon box that fell of had this in it.

Yay!!!

It will be some weeks before we need to use the soil auger, but I’ll be putting one of those soil testers in the garden bed we’re working on as soon as I can!

It has been a very productive day today – and it’s only half over. Much better than trying to get things done in the city, yesterday!! And no snarky people. Not one.

One of the things I picked up today was a bottle of white wine. Historical Italian Cooking released another video recently, and I am really looking forward to trying it!

The Re-Farmer