Garden Power Tools

[Theseus]

Just been doing a bit of gardening ...

Most useless power tool ... Leaf blower/sucker
- all it did on suck was to pick up a clump and on blow it just made a mess.

Most useful power tool ... Lawn mower
- not only can it cut the grass, but when you run it over the pile of leaves that the leaf blower was useless for, it neatly picked them up and packed them for transport to the compost heap.

 

[upsidedown]

At work we've got two or three blokes constantly walking around with petrol powered leaf blowers , utterly pointless.

 

[beanzontoast]

Most useful would be the strimmer. Touch wood, the Black and Decker one we have now is great - it's only jammed once in a year and is still on the original spool of cutting twine that came with it (I sourced a spool several times the capacity from Amazon thinking the original wouldn't last long, and it's still sitting waiting to be used).

 

[661-Pete]

I agree about the leaf blower nonsense - they use one of those in the car park at work: generally the leaves end up piled against the cycle stands, for want of a better place...

After the lawn mower, our next most worthwhile acquisition was the shredder. We call it "The Martian" because it stands on three legs and has a voracious appetite - for twigs and branches! It reduces everything to a mulch which you can easily 'lose' under bushes and shrubbery in the garden. No more trips to the public dump with bootloads of greenery! One thing that's a must when operating it: thick gloves. Unless you want your fingers disappearing into the maw of the thing along with the brambles ...

 

[Piemaster]

From the above posts, and my own feelings on the matter, the better the garden tool, the more dangerous it is:
Good: lawnmower
Better: shredder
Best; Chainsaw

Poor; leafblower
Worse: grass rake
Worst: trowel

 

[Ranger]

After years of experience with garden power tools my favourite is and always has been the chainsaw, closely followed by a commercial power take off chipper. The satisfaction of feeding in a tree that needs a mechanical grab to handle it and being presented with a pile of chippings at the other end is quite unbelieveable

 

[meenaghman]

My favorite is a 3 ton digger. Got rid of a load of bushes. I have quite a big hard so a decent petrol powered power washer is great. Still takes me 3 days to wash the yard ratios and paths/drive. Chainsaw lost their appeal after a summer lumberjacking. I go through spools of simmer wire..hedge trimming is 2 days work. Im thinking I might torch the hedge next year. Growth in Ireland is ridiculous..the lawn still could do with mowing and its November nearly. My next purchase may be a billygoat..the mechanical kind..sort of clean and chip anything.

 

[accountantpete]

Lawn scarifier - the amount of moss they get out has to be seen to be believed.

 

[slowmotion]

Anything with a very noisy two-stroke exhaust has got to be good. Oooooh, that smell spells FUN.

 

[661-Pete]

I have quite a big hard so a decent petrol powered power washer is great.

Show-off!

 

[Headgardener]

Beat me to it Pete .

 

[telesonic99]

For a bet I once blew a leaf from Land's End to Joan O'Groats (a pub just outside Land's End).