Hand Tools, Seeds, and Supplies
(Page 2 of 10)
April/May 1998
By John Vivian
Several Ames designs, as well as their own brand of full strap, ash handle, and all-steel nursery tools, are listed in the catalog of Sensible Tools for the Serious Gardener by A. M. Leonard of Piqua, Ohio. Unlike better known, more promotional, glossy, full color, upscale garden-goods catalogs, Leonard features tools that work, rather than imported copper watering cans and gloves with the thumbs dyed green.
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Several old-line British firms still make high-quality gardening tools by hand, most notably beautiful garden forks with forged tines and square-ended spades featuring flat foot-steps welded on the blade tops, all with clear, white ash D handles. The Bulldog brand was marketed by North American mail order seedsmen, but the latest entrant is Spear & Jackson, a firm that has been hand-working steel in Sheffield, England, since 1760. Their Sovereign line has all the quality features plus a long-lasting, no-stick, no-rust epoxy covering on the blades, reasonable prices ($35 to $45), and a fifty-year guarantee.
Much of the appeal of British tools is their sturdy appearance. You may find Spear & Jackson's bilious yellow stain and nubbly gray epoxy a little garish, but after a season's use and an application of preservative oil, the colors mellow. By then, you'll have found the tools' strength and utility so pleasing you wouldn't care if they came painted purple. In addition to short digging tools with D handles, you can get the same blades fitted with extra-long sixty-inch pitching handles.
Spear & Jackson tools are sold in the catalogs of Peaceful Valley in northern California, and other seed catalogs and garden tool outlets across the continent including Agway, a large farm co-op with stores throughout the Northeast.
Care
The working end of a quality shovel or fork's wooden handle is shaved to a dull point to fit securely into long tubular sockets forged into the steel. But water loves to accumulate in the socket, wanting to rust steel and rot wood. With any of these tools, the weak, breaking point in the handle wood is at the top of the socket. Be sure to soak the handle — socket area in particular — in deck preservative and keep it limber with linseed oil, or mix up the old-time boat-builder's mix of equal parts Cuprinol, DAP or other Copperbase wood preservative, boiled linseed oil, and turpentine.
Trowels and Other Small Tools
With backs that are beginning to show their age, we're especially pleased to note the longer-handled trowels, hand forks and hand hoes coming to market. They come in twelve-inch planting lengths or eighteen-inch cultivating lengths. Snow & Nealley of Bangor, Maine, retail markets a three-piece set of twelve-inchers in a green canvas bag at about $10 per tool. Each seed or garden tool catalog seems to have chosen a selection of long-handled tools that appeals to its own staff and customers. Seeds of Change, for instance, lists a handforged Dutch hand hoe with a two by four inch triangular head that "is balanced to give you power where you need it — on the inside of your arm."
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