Maintaining an immaculate lawn goes beyond simply mowing and the occasional bit of string trimming. There are a lot of other essential tools that make the art of maintaining a good-looking lawn easier.
This includes rakes, hose reels, and leaf blowers, just to name a few. So, if you love a good-looking lawn, but you hate putting in a lot of back-breaking labor then you need to have the right tools for the job. This starts with adding some of the following things to your lawn care arsenal.
Rakes
Rakes come in many forms, but the two most popular for taking care of your lawn, garden, and landscaping break down into leaf rakes, for moving lightweight materials like grass clippings, and leaves. Then there are also garden rakes that are used for doing things like roughing up the soil, moving more dense materials, and can even be flipped over to help smooth out rough patches of soil.
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Garden Hoe
Garden Hoes play an essential role in helping you clear material and make shallow trenches. They are most handy in the garden. Though a hoe can be equally helpful for maintaining crisp lines in the lawn around sidewalks, patios, and driveways. It can come in handy if you don’t have a string trimmer, or your string trimmer isn’t working in a pinch.
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Hose Reels
Hoses are great for delivering hydrating water from the faucet to the garden, or other landscaping plants. Though a tangled mess of hose can be a real eyesore that hurts your home’s curb appeal. A simple hose reel helps tame garden hose and some can even hold a large spool inside of an ordinary-looking garden bench.
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Leaf Blower
Leaf blowers are a godsend when the leaves of fall start to pile up on your lawn threatening to suffocate your grass. Though leaf blowers need not be confined to just a few weeks of usefulness each year. Battery-powered leaf blowers with a lithium-ion battery can help blow away grass clippings and lightweight lawn debris on a weekly basis.
A leaf blower is especially handy if you have a side discharge lawnmower. Windrows of harvested grass clippings can be blown away right after you finish mowing. Not only will this leave your lawn looking nice, but it will prevent those lingering grass clippings from drying out into choking thatch!
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Pruning Shears & Loppers
A lot of landscaping plants and fruit trees need to be pruned back during the dormant period of winter or early spring. Sometimes this is for training them into a neat and visually appealing shape, or to produce the right type of airflow to prevent common fungal diseases from affecting your perennials.
Pruning sears can be divided into single hand shears, which you would use for doing things like cutting back vines or pruning roses. Then there are loppers which are robust two-handed units that utilize leverage to let you cut through thicker branches. Some of the best lopping shears can cut through a two-inch diameter tree branch, which is ideal for pruning fruit trees and flowering landscaping trees.
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Shovels
There are a lot of different types of shovels for just about every occasion. Though when it comes to maintaining your lawn in the summer, you need to have at least one spade shovel and one flat-nosed “Scoop” shovel. This will give you the ability to dig holes when you need to, or scoop up loose materials like mulch and compost.
When it comes to choosing the best shovel for the money, it helps to over-spend on a shovel with a reinforced fiberglass or metal handle, over a cheaper wooden handle shovel. The cost might be double for the superior handle, but it will have triple or quadruple the lifespan. Not only do wood-handled shovels not last as long, but they also have a knack for breaking at the worst possible time.
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Spreader
Spreaders can vary in scale from the kind of small hand spreaders you might use to reseed a small patch of lawn, to a larger broadcast spreader that you might use to fertilize your garden or overseed grass seed across your entire lawn. If you do need to frequently broadcast seed and fertilizer over a large area, you might want to get a pull-behind model rather than a manual push spreader. This will let you tow it behind a riding lawn mower or lawn tractor.
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Aerator
When it comes to aerating large sections of the lawn in the spring or fall, you are usually better off hiring a professional lawn care company or renting a tow-behind aerator. Though for smaller lawns or problem areas where thatch buildup has caused the soil to compact, a simple manual aerator can work wonders. This is usually either a single poker tool on the end of a typical shovel handle or a two-prong model that pulls out small soil plugs throughout the layers of the turf.
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edge Trimmer
Hedge trimmers are essentially small power saws with oscillating teeth. They do a good job of chewing through light bushes and pine hedges. Though most struggle to cut through anything thicker than half an inch. The best hedge trimmer for the money tends to be one with a rechargeable lithium-ion battery.
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Wheelbarrow
It turns out that wheelbarrows are for more than just moving cement and sand around a construction site. When can be invaluable tools for transporting all kinds of lawn care materials and tools. You can use a wheelbarrow to move mulch, small piles of leaves, and compost. It can even be used to transport your lawncare tools all in one convenient go-anywhere cart.
If you have a large lawn with a lot of trees, then picking up sticks is a constant chore. In a case like this, you might want to prioritize a wheelbarrow that has two robust front wheels. This will let you move it one-handed, while you walk along picking up sticks.
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Safety Equipment
It is all too easy to forget about the value of safety equipment when it comes to lawn care. However, dust kicking up in your eyes can cause you to veer off course, loud mower engines can gradually start to damage your hearing, and working with handled tools can cause blisters and give you splinters.
So, while they aren’t as exciting as power tools and lawn carts, you still need to make room in your budget for some simple earplugs, rated safety glasses, and work gloves.
