What’s your favourite garden tool?

The Garden Project column from New Hopetoun Gardens: sustainability special

We both might have said our spade was our favourite garden tool ten years ago but Lesley has gone ‘no dig’ in our potager and finds this mid-handled Claw Cultivator is always her first choice – she can cultivate, rake and weed but denies using it as a back scratcher.

Dougal would take his spade to a desert island because you can do so much with it but now that their garden has been generously planted for more than 10 years his first choice is to have his secateurs in his back pocket. Regular pruning little and often is the order of the day and cutting flowers for the house as well as heavy pruning and thinning out in the winter keeps the secateurs in use all year round.

So what to do with your unwanted and perhaps unloved old garden tools?

We collect them at the garden centre and they go to HM Prison Edinburgh where they are reconditioned and repaired in the workshops and then donated to community and school gardening projects. Last year the prison recycled 1200 garden tools and if that’s not sustainability we don’t know what is!

Make some space in your shed and garage this autumn… we also recycle the pots that came with the plants you bought from us…

Take your unwanted garden tools to New Hopetoun Gardens where they to to HM Prison Edinburgh to be reconditions and repaired in the workshops then donated to community and school gardening projects

---

Published in Konect October 2019

The Garden Project column is contributed by Dougal Philip, New Hopetoun Gardens. Inspiring, informing and entertaining for more than 40 years.

https://www.newhopetoungardens.co.uk/