You may have noticed, if you follow us, that we are not desperately useful on the ‘how of gardening’.

That is because we are essentially frivolous beings: garden designers!

More interested in the ‘how it looks’.

So you will not often find urgent advice about when to sow parsley seed or begin blanching your chicory here.

However, very occasionally a fit just takes us to be practical, and this is one such occasion:

 

 

We subscribe to that extraordinary worldwide gardening institution of bloggers known as  www.blotanical.com. And one of the questions which you answer for your personal profile on your ‘plot’ is the tools in your garden shed.

Really I suppose it is aimed at the tools in your shed that you actually use. In fact these are never actually put away, if we are honest. These tools sit on the floor just inside the door.

They are three:

Felco secateurs. Yes, boring, boring, boring. Everyone always says that don’t they? They ARE the best though.

They seem to stay sharp for a really long time. Buy yourself a stone and you can easily disassemble them and sharpen them yourself. If your nerve fails you they have this genius servicing company who send them back like new.

Loppers. We all try to stretch the capacity of secateurs to cut small branches of wood at some point. And its a mistake! For good sharp cuts of really thicker wood, short of those that need a saw, ratchet mechanism loppers of some kind really save your wrists and arm muscles. And the older you get, the better that gets!

Hand Hoe. Is probably the gem of the group.

Laetitia Maklouf ,aka The Virgin Gardener, in her charming blog www.laetitiamaklouf.com advises a key job for May to be nuking your tiny weeds before they become disastrously big weeds with a ‘nice sexy hand hoe.’  You can with care also get very close to plants you do NOT wish to nuke if you use this rather than a long handled hoe.

Well guys they don’t come any sexier than the one above. It is the shape and angle of its head! Suspect it was Spear and Jackson, but haven’t seen one to buy like this in years. It belonged to the parents of one of us and is probably fifty years old!

So you are going to say you need a bucket and a barrow and a ladder and a saw etc etc.

But you would get a long way with these three!

Lesley and Robert

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