Hit the Dirt; Garden Tools

Good morning. This is Dave Weigel today's host for hit the dirt. And today I'd like to talk about a gardening tools. I have many different tools that have grown very attached to through my professional gardening efforts and I have learned a lot about which tools work well and and which ones I ovoid buying in the future. And two sources for tools that I found to be very useful are the smith and Hawken catalog and the AM Leonard catalog. Both of these sources are very good at shipping the products that you order very rapidly and if you order now I should have no trouble getting the tools that you'd like to have before Christmas. And hand tools of course are very basic to anyone's gardening efforts in that the tools that I probably use the very most in the garden are my pruners. There's a wide variation in printers they come in two basic types either the anvil type or the bypass type. And I find it a good well-made pair of bypass pruners is the most effective in most situations.

And being a left hander I've really enjoyed using special Felker lefthanded pruners that I have. I worked with for the past several years and the thing if you're expecting to buy some printers for someone on your list figure on spending $20 or possibly a little bit more if you want a good quality set of pruners you're much better off to buy good tools to begin with and you'll have good tools to work with. For a long time instead of buying inexpensive tools that don't work very well to begin with and won't last very long and the other thing I caution people about is you're buying pruners. Look for a pair with red or orange handle grips that have very high visibility when you set them down in the garden or the lawn. Definitely avoid anything with green grips on the pruners because you'll end up losing them almost right away and spend countless time frustratedly trying to find the printers that you set now. Hand trouser a tool that every gardener uses very frequently

and dime store trousers that many people are trying to create beautiful gardens with are very frustrating to you. The first time you pride back on the handle little band and often break but there's a new generation of trouser with either one piece forged aluminum construction or with a strongly reinforced steel handles that work very well and most of those are available for under $10. Another hand tool that I really enjoy using in the garden a lawn is a what I call a weed Popper it's a long handled Fort type tool that is. Some people call it a dandelion Popper it's really easy to insert it into the lawn and pop out the whole tap root of a dandelion and you can do very well using this tool. I like the ones with the wooden rounded handles as opposed to the plastic molded handle type. Shovels have come a long way in

the past few years I've broken I don't know how many wooden handled shovels in my landscape gardening career and the new generation of fiberglass handle shovels works very well. Some of them are quite heavy but if you look around you can find some that are light and strong and they're excellent for any transplanting efforts that your gardener might be interested in doing. You can really get a lot of leverage and have at times used them almost for a pry bar and the extraction of plants or digging rocks out of a garden and I'm trying to prepare a garden forks are very useful anyone that doesn't have a spading fork in his gardening tool collection is very much handicapped and once again I found that graphite or fiberglass handled ones have become very much in vogue and they work very well. And a pry bar is something that many gardeners wouldn't have in their repertoire but it's very useful for many

things besides just prying and digging on rocks. You can use it to poke holes to plant bulbs with. You can use it to aerate around the roots of trees. There are many many uses for a pry bar and Saul's pruning saw as are a favorite tool for anyone who likes to take good care of the yard and the new turbo style pruning saw is very effective. They work very well that much faster than the old Sol's you can get the folding varieties that are easy to carry around with you and they do a wonderful job and whatever you pick for the gardener on your list. Like I said again just pick the best quality tool that you can possibly afford and I'm sure that whoever you give it to will be overjoyed and think of you every time they go into the garden and until next time this is Dave Weigel for hit the dirt. Happy gardening.