Benefits of a chiminea
Popular gifts for gardeners: The chiminea
Apr
Set us free in the garden and you won’t see us again until dusk. We’ll be out there, grubbing away until darkness falls, perfectly at peace whatever the weather, unaware of time passing, lost in space. Lovely. On the other hand it can soon get uncomfortable when the weather’s grim and your hands are wet, muddy and freezing. While many popular gifts for gardeners are about as surprising as night following day, a chiminea might be exactly what your green fingered fellow human needs to stay outside longer, later, for more or the year.
Popular gifts for gardeners don’t need to be BORING!
Gardening gloves? Always useful but… meh. New secateurs? Much the same. But a chiminea, whether it’s a clay model or something in cast iron, makes an excellent resting spot to warm up and relax before the next gardening task. Because they heat up fast and you only need a small fire to warm up the round body so it starts to radiate, there’s no wasting valuable gardening time. Throw bits of fuel in every now and again and the fire will crackle away safely without any worries about setting the cat on fire or sending the shed up in flames. Unlike an open fire there’s no supervision required.
There’s nothing quite as nice as warming chilly hands around a chimenea as it steadily belts out a satisfying amount of heat. There’s no need to head indoors for refreshments when you can warm up soup in a cookpot on top of the chimney, build a chunky vegetable kebab on a skewer or do yourself a quick bacon buttie on a grill inside. Because a chim gives off 360 degree heat there’s room for a whole family’s worth of gardening geeks to warm themselves up at once.
The fire is safely contained so over-excited children and pets can’t fall into it or try to jump over it. Minimal – if any – smoke and ash means you won’t fall foul of your neighbours by ruining their washing or stinking them back indoors. It doesn’t leave much ash inside either, a remarkably clean-burning fire. Dry your gardening gloves and warm up your wellies around it if you like, but not actually on the body, which can get impressively hot.
Add a plethora of extras for more elaborate cooking, protecting the chiminea in bad weather and generally getting the most out of it. It’s no surprise our customers think a chiminea makes a top present, one of the most unusual, useful, versatile and attractive popular gifts for gardeners.
Once you’ve had enough of the green stuff there’s no faff. As you’d expect the clay ones cool down a little bit more slowly than the metal versions but there’s no need to put a chiminea to bed, just abandon it and the fire will safely go out without spreading.
How are they made? Cast iron chimineas tend to be cast, as the name suggests. Steel chimineas are usually welded, not moulded. Clay chimeneas are hand made and fired in a huge kiln using the same clay as terracotta plant pots. Some are fired once to a bisque finish, others are fired a second time with a glaze. Being made in Mexico and imported by sea, the designs we sell all come with exceptional performance. Always choose a proper Mexican design for the best possible performance: it’s all about the proportions, which they’ve arrived at after centuries of perfecting the design.
So do you buy a clay chiminea or a metal chiminea? In a nutshell the metal ones burn hotter and are less prone to heat stress, which can crack a clay chiminea if you go in too fast with a too-hot, too-big fire. Clay is also vulnerable to frost, unlike cast iron or steel, but a special layered protective cover does the trick through winter.
We hope the gardener in your life appreciates their new chiminea. Just bear in mind that it makes such a difference, you might see even less of them in future!
