Gardeners are thrifty souls. They turn their garden waste into compost. And you’ll often find that once they find the right tool for a job, they keep that tool until it literally disintegrates in their hands.
The 'Blade'
I know because I just started using my second blade hoe. The first one was finally sharpened away into shavings and was no longer strong enough to do the job. My husband made this hoe. It is shaped roughly like a quarter-moon and is sharpened on all edges of the blade.
The blade runs just under the soil surface cutting off weeds almost as fast as you can walk on both the push or pull stroke. The wings allow you to prick out weeds from the seed row. While the blade is incredibly sharp it also has the potential to wipe out a lot of stuff in the garden.
Work too fast around squash or cucumber plants and you can easily wipe them out. Or work around T-tape, used for drip irrigation, and you can slice right into it.
There are similar hoes on the market but they don’t work as well due to the quality of materials used.
Oriental hand-weeder
My next favorite tool is a hand-weeder created by a Master Gardener friend’s husband. He created it after hand-weeders he saw being used while working overseas in Indonesia. The one drawback to this tool is that you will be weeding on your knees, so purchase a good pair of knee pads. The best part means you are close to your plants and can see to pick and choose between baby plants that develop from self-seeding varieties. The blade is about two- to three-inches-wide with a razor sharp leading-edge.
Long-handled trowel
As I grow older I find that I do more work standing up than on my knees if at all possible. I purchased a long-handled trowel which helps me plant while standing. The tool is 21” long from the tip of the blade to the end of the handle. Because of the length of the handle, it does have a lot of leverage. So be careful when you purchase that the quality of trowel and its tang are sufficient to its use. Light weight aluminum trowels and tangs easily bend, and once they bend they are soon destined for the trash heap.
Planting auger
There is always so much work to do in the spring during planting time, that anything that can speed up the process is always good. I purchased an auger to plant bulbs in the fall. It works to plant glad bulbs, potato sets and individual bedding plants, as well. I use my husband’s cordless drill to run the auger. Having a good drill with a long battery life is important, or you will be waiting on the drill battery to charge rather than using the time planting.
Cord bucket
You may have already heard of this idea, but if not do give it a try. There are a multitude of gardening tools that require electricity to run them. Containing the cords is a pain and stringing them out is worse. Use a five-gallon bucket and drill a hole on the side at the bottom large enough to pull the plug through it. Pull out about five feet of cord and coil the rest into the bucket. When ready to use, plug the cord in and walk away unrolling the cord as you go. Cords feed out steadily with no problems. Add a lid to the bucket and rain can’t get to most of the cord. The bucket makes for easy over-winter storage.
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