by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Home improvement stores such as B&Q, Homebases, Home Depot, etc., are all full of gadgets and devices aimed at easing your gardening work, and the same is true for garden centers. However, many successful home gardens are cultivated with a handful of good hand tools only. None of the high-tech alternatives can really help you grow a tastier tomato or brighter begonias.
A gardener’s toolkit requires little more than a trowel, fork, manual weeder, rake, and shears. Each time-tested tool beats several high-tech alternatives. Invest in good tools here that will last for a generation or more. There are some great brands from which to chose and some of the Japanese garden tools also you might like to consider adding to the list in the end. But, as said, you really need no more that the five tools mentioned to get going.
Shears: A good pair of bypass pruning shears (secateurs) can keep many trees and shrubs neat and tidy. They are also a great tool for the harvesting of vegetables and flowers, the clearing away dead leaves and the cutting away of weeds from the plants you want to keep.
Power pruners such as the Alligator Lopper add chainsaw teeth and electric scissor action. They may seem like a great idea, but sharp hand pruners are plenty powerful for most home gardeners. The Alligator Lopper may be more hazard than help in many homes.
In addition to the secateurs I would suggest a good pair of sturdy loppers. Don't get extendible ones at they are often too weak for serious cutting work. Hand tools are by far better than anything electric- or gas-powered with the exception of some tools for special purposes.
Another overrated alternative is the Garden Groom collecting electric hedge trimmer. It looks like an oversized high-tech iron, and it trims away hedges, then shreds and collects the leaves all in one device. However, users complain it is too heavy and may not do the job. It only cuts a small amount at a time, so it requires several passes on many hedges. It also doesn’t pick up all the debris.
Rake: Garden vacuums – either gas- or electric-powered – are rather popular among people concerned to keep a perfect garden and yard. They suck up leaves and dirt, and that is where the problem lies. The dirt, the soil, belongs in the garden. Instead consider raking the leaves and other debris, or simply leaving many of them where they fall.
There is no need to remove leaves from around trees and other places in the garden in fall in preparation for winter. On the contrary: leave the leaves; they act as mulch and turn into healthy mulch, acting as soil improver in the end
Talking of mulch: those leaves that you decide to rake up and remove turn into mulch for next year. Don't throw them, not even into the compost. This means that you don’t have to send all those bags of vacuumed leaves to the landfill. It would be a shame to do that anyway.
Weeder: A simple hand weeder is still the best way to get rid of unwanted plants. Even for pesky, deep-rooted dandelions, just push the little tines down to the bottom of the dandelion roots and pull up the weed.
There are old, low-tech alternatives that let you stand up and weed. There also are electric weeders that burn away weeds with hot ceramic plates. Still, if you’re willing to do the work, the lowly weeder is the best option.
My recommendation as to weeding deep-rooted weeds, such as dandelions, though I'd rather eat them than destroy them, are two tools that are related to each other really. There is “Grandpa's Weeder” with the beautiful wooden handle and then there is the Fiskars Weed Puller W52/W82 which is basically Grandpa's Weeder on steroids.
Fork: Garden forks are great for loosening and turning soil, and they are the best way to turn and aerate compost. As home vegetable gardening grows in popularity, home composting is also hot (pun intended) and every week seems to bring a new composting gadget or device – an electric indoor compost bin, fancy compost aerators, compost thermometers and more.
However, a garden fork and perhaps a rotating compost bin are all you need to turn your kitchen scraps and garden waste into compost.
Trowel: Finally, a basic trowel may be the handiest tool in the garden shed. It’s all you need for plenty of digging, planting, harvesting and weeding. There are plenty of alternatives, but a hand trowel trumps them all. However, that’s not to say you can’t improve on a classic.
For example, aluminum-and-magnesium trowels with curved, ergonomic grips are still just tiny garden shovels. They just last longer — and your hands last longer using them.
As far as trowels are concerned I would either advocate a real good quality one with wooden handle and all that or the Thingamadig Trowel, sold in the UK through Lakeland. This has become, ever since I got a sample for review and reviewed it, my favorite digging tool in the garden.
Hand hoe: If you are using raised beds and planters, as is done often now as to vegetable growing, and personally I grow mine in anything I can find and repurpose, the hand hoe is a very efficient tool for loosening up the top soil, cutting off weeds, etc.
The Thingamadig Hand Hoe, based on a Japanese design, and a wooden handled version of this can be found at Burgon & Ball, is something that I would not want to be without anymore an d better still if the CobraHead, where I have both the bog long-handle tool and the hand held and the latter is another one of those tools that you will not do without ever again ones you have tried it.
There is not need for gadgets in the garden. They are often a distraction, especially when they don't want to work because of this or that “upset”. Hand tools that use human power alone also are independent of any power source and thus green.
Another tool to consider for your armory is a good quality pruning saw with so-called turbo cut blade. This, on small branches and trees is faster than setting up and using a chain saw.
I could continue here with advice on some other additions in the hand tools department, such as a scythe for brush cutting and also for cutting high grass and the real real mower, the push version, for doing you lawn but may keep that for another time.
© 2011
