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| Photo Credit: Megan Bame |
| Megan’s favorite tool is her pair of Felco® pruners. The brightly colored handles help keep the tool from getting lost in the garden. |
Whether it’s a high-tech power edger or a simple shovel, every gardener has that one special tool they just can’t live without. It may not be the newest product on the market, but it sure does get the job done. Here’s a look at what tools we find to be the most handy when working in our own gardens:
Megan’s tool of choice: Felco® hand pruners. It was my first college horticulture class that introduced me to Felco hand pruners. The professor endorsed them as his favorite, but at “a suggested retail value” of around $40, the pruners were out of my “poor college student” budget. As the fall semester came to a close, I knew those Felcos would be high on my Christmas list. When Santa came through for me, I was ready to put them to work! Over the past 10 years, I’ve put these pruners to the test and have never been disappointed – even when I pushed the caliper limits of hand pruners. The smooth, red handles are comfortable to grip. (They’re also easy to spot when I’ve laid them down to attend to something else and I come back searching for where I put my trusty tool.) Felco offers 13 models of pruners with various special features. I’m partial to model 6 (F6). It’s lightweight and designed for small hands (ideal for women). I can use my hands alone for a lot of gardening tasks – from weeding to digging a hole or even squashing bugs. But pruning is one job that almost always requires a tool, and I wouldn’t want to garden without my Felcos! David’s pick: A pocketknife. My favorite garden tool is a large-sized, folding lock-blade pocket knife with a partially serrated blade. You can do nearly anything with this tool – dig in the soil, emergency-prune, cut roots, stab white grubs, scrape old containers clean, get the dirt out of your garden shoes, extract rose thorns from your fingers and clean under your fingernails at the end of the gardening day. I never go into my garden without it!
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