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Mother Nature's Garden Tools |
| By Mike Litchfield
Maud Cross could grow anything. Her sweet peas were always up first, her corn was waist high by the Fourth of July and her gladiolus rioted from May through September. She swore by aged chicken manure—with 500 chickens in her barn, she was certainly an expert on that subject—but I think Maud really just understood Mother Nature.
She did all her soil-turning and weed-tending by hand, having as little use for mechanical tillers as she did for clocks. One day in her kitchen, I noticed that her three clocks differed by more than an hour. "Oh, bosh," she said, "I don't mind that nonsense. I'm on God's time. When the girls [the chickens] get up, I go."
The tools described below are all ones I saw Maud use—with the exception of the garden cart. Her garden was so tightly planted, she needed a wheelbarrow to navigate the rows. Finally, any tool of hers had to last; she threw nothing away. As she might say, "Buy well and use long." |
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Digging Tools
Digging is at the heart of all gardening. Whether you're prepping a flowerbed, planting a shrub or edging a path, you'll need at least one shovel or spade and a garden fork. |
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Shovels and spades. Whatever distinction there once was between shovels and spades blurred a long time ago. Some gardeners think of the spade as a cutting tool and the shovel as an earthmover. Others consider the tool with the flat blade a spade and the one with the blade that curves to a center point a shovel. For our purposes, we'll throw in with this second lot—spades have flat cutting edges, shovels curve to a point. (Though both curve to some degree.) |
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On the best spades and shovels, the blade and handle socket are forged and formed from one piece of thick steel. They are much more durable than two-piece blade-and-socket constructions.
There are two types of handles (and you'll find both kinds on shovels as well as spades): a short handle that stands about waist high and has a D-shaped grip, and a long handle that's about shoulder height. The longer handle gives you greater leverage and requires less bending, but it's less versatile in cramped quarters. What the handle's made of doesn't matter all that much if you care for the tool and don't leave it out in the weather.
If you can afford only one tool, make it a D-handled spade. With it, you can move piles of earth, compost or mulch and edge a flowerbed—a task that's clumsy to do with a shovel. However, if you're planning to do a lot of digging, get both a spade and a long-handled shovel. |
| Garden forks. A garden fork is almost as essential as a spade or shovel. It's ideal for loosening soil and mixing in compost, reworking an established bed and digging up plants so you can divide or move them. Four sturdy tines, each about 10 inches long and as thick as a finger, make up the business end of this tool. |
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| The best-quality forks are forged and welded of thick steel, with the handle socket and tines forming a single unit. Garden forks usually have short, waist-high, D-shaped handles made of wood or fiberglass.
Heavy-duty forks with thick tines will handle any job. But forks with long, thin, flatter tines—"pitchforks"—are a better bet if you handle a lot of compost or the soil of your garden is light and well worked. A long-handled pitchfork is especially good for turning piles of composting matter. |
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Trowels. A trowel is a scaled-down shovel, indispensable for small gardening tasks like planting seedlings, digging out a stubborn tap-rooted weed or filling an urn with potting soil. Buy a narrow trowel for transplanting seedlings and a broader one for scooping potting soil. Once again, tools with one-piece blade and handle sockets and with thicker blades last longer and are less likely to bend. |
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Garden rakes. The garden rake's short, stiff tines make it great for busting clods, smoothing and grading seedbeds, and clearing debris. The rake's comblike head is usually 16 to 17 inches wide. Like shovels, the best-quality rakes have heads and sockets forged from a single piece of steel. Because this tool takes a lot of abuse, buy a good one. Cheap ones are worse than useless. |
| Lawn rakes. Lawn rakes, with their long, flexible tines fanning out from the handle, are fine for clearing leaves and stems from garden beds, spreading mulch and tidying paths of wood chips or gravel. The best test of quality is how well the rake head is attached to the handle. Fortunately, lawn rakes are cheap and easily replaced. |
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Pruning Tools
Plants, like people, benefit from good grooming. It makes them healthier, better looking and sometimes more productive. This grooming, or pruning, ranges from snipping off spent flowers (called deadheading) to cutting stems and branches almost to the ground.
Though pruning tasks vary widely, most can be accomplished with just three tools: pruning shears, loppers and a folding saw. |
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Pruning shears. The short, powerful blades of pruning shears can cut through a woody stem as thick as your little finger. Many gardeners carry pruning shears with them whenever they walk through the garden. There are numerous sizes and brands, but all fall into two categories. Bypass shears have offset blades that work like a pair of scissors; one blade slices as it slides by the other (supporting) blade. Anvil shears have a sharp blade that cuts against the flat surface (the anvil) of its mate, like a knife on a cutting board. Bypass shears are probably the most versatile; they're useful for deadheading as well as more demanding pruning. But some folks prefer anvil shears for pruning harder wood. |
| Loppers. These are essentially pruning shears with long handles and beefed-up blades. Able to cut green wood up to 2 inches thick, loppers can prune most shrubs and many tree limbs. The long handles also make them ideal for snipping stems in the center of a rose or a dense bush. They have either bypass or anvil blades and wooden, metal or composite handles. Ratcheted models are ideal for people with limited hand strength. |
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Folding saws. This tool consists of a narrow saw blade about 7 inches long that folds into a wood, plastic or composite handle of similar length. With a sharp folding saw, you can cut through green limbs as thick as 4 inches, the largest size that most homeowners should try to handle on their own. Look for saws with long, pointy teeth that cut on the pull stroke. |
Hauling
Gardening generates a lot of stuff that has to be hauled around. Wheelbarrows or garden carts are indispensable for hauling topsoil, mulch or new plants to a garden bed and for toting grass clippings, leaves or other organic debris to the compost heap. For either, inflatable tires will give you a much smoother, less jarring ride. |
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Wheelbarrows. A wheelbarrow's single wheel makes it easy to maneuver along narrow, twisty garden paths and over uneven terrain. It also makes it easy to tip the wheelbarrow over. Although a bigger one carries more, a wheelbarrow takes some strength to handle when it's full. If your lot is hilly, choose a smaller wheelbarrow. It's less hassle to push it uphill. |
| Garden carts. Rolling on two to four wheels, these carts are more stable and easier to roll than a wheelbarrow. Plus, their rectangular "bins" hold more. On the other hand, they're bulkier and less maneuverable over narrow paths and uneven surfaces. Unlike the contents of a wheelbarrow, which can be tipped onto a pile, a garden cart's load usually needs to be scooped out. A bonus: garden carts are great for taking trash cans to the end of the driveway. |
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Mike Litchfield is the editor in chief of CornerHardware.com. He and Maud Cross were neighbors in Concord Corners, Vermont, in the early 1970s. Opening photo courtesy of Susan Karchmer. |
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