Half Round Clearing Tool

Garden tools cover hand tools for digging, hoeing, weeding and clearing, cutting tools for pruning and splitting wood, push-along and handheld lawn spreaders, wheelbarrows and folding trolleys, compost caddies and bins, and powered mowers and trimmers.

Cutting and pruning

• Bypass secateurs and loppers: two blades slide past each other like scissors, giving a clean cut on soft, living stems without bruising them.
• Anvil secateurs and loppers: one blade closes down onto a flat anvil, which suits hard and dead wood.
• Loppers: long handles give extra leverage on thicker branches. Check the stated cutting capacity in millimetres, and look at telescopic handles for high growth.
• Hatchets and splitting axes: a hatchet is compact and suits kindling and small logs. A splitting axe has a wider head that drives the wood apart, for larger firewood.

Lawn spreaders

Drop spreaders let feed or seed fall through a row of holes in the base of the hopper, while rotary spreaders scatter it from a spinning disc underneath. Set the dial to the spreader setting printed on the product pack, and if a second pass is needed, walk it at right angles to the first to avoid stripes.

Mowers and trimmers

Powered mowers and trimmers run on a rechargeable battery, a mains cable or petrol. Plug mains tools into an RCD with a trip rating of no more than 30 milliamps, press its test button regularly, and check the plug and cable for damage before each use. Where conditions are damp, battery tools are an alternative to mains power. Follow the manufacturer's instructions and safety data for power tools and fuel.

For pruning tools, see cutting and pruning; for mowers and trimmers, see garden power tools.