Gardening Tools – A few Excellent Tips To Help You Take Care Of Them
Knowing how to appropriately use and maintain yard tools will increase their life, help prevent personal injury, and increase your gardening enjoyment. For example, correctly uncoiling a hose will prevent you from tripping or catching your foot in the coil. The points of an upturned rake can inflict painful and sometimes serious puncture wounds when stepped on, to say nothing about the possibility of the handle flying up and striking you in the face. You mustn’t leave any of your tools with sharp edges or points in the grass or leaves, or other type of material which can hide that edge and cause an accident. Try to stay away from lawn mower blades, and this doesn’t only mean when they are running, as just brushing up against one that is sharp can leave a nice cut on your hand or arm. If you have a tool with a wooden handle on it and it has a small crack on it, you can repair this with some black tape. It actually works pretty well. A glass filament tape is particularly useful for such a job.
Splinters in wooden handles of rakes, hoes, and shovels can be cured by sanding the face until it becomes smooth again; this not only protects your hands, but keeps the cracks from spreading and causing the handle to break.
A really easy way to make your wood handles last a little longer is to put on a few coats of either quality varnish or a good coat of paint. The metal parts of the tool may be painted, with a primer coat, and two coats of exterior paint. You needn’t paint any of the metal parts that are made to work in the ground, as it will come right off anyhow when you use the tool.
Aside from preservation by paint, the tools are easier to find when their handles are of a color which makes them conspicuous if left lying on the grass: So with this being known, you should make a point to not paint your tools in colors like brown and green, but instead florescent colors and blues, yellow, reds, and such will keep them from getting lost in the grass.
The normal wear and tear on tools will happen when you use them and this often results in the edges of the tool becoming nicked or damaged. These may be smoothed with a metal file. By using an abrasive material like steel wool or something similar you can effectively get rid of any of the rough surfaces that sometimes occur on the metal parts of tools that are not correctly maintained. If they have any dents in them, you can easily straighten them out by using a mallet. Prompt attention always needs to be paid to parts on a wheelbarrow that are broken or cracked be they metal or wood parts. Painting the wheelbarrow helps preserve the wood. The moving parts need occasional oiling, to run smoothly. When storing your yard tools through the winter, you need to make sure that you store them in a dry spot as any type of dampness can cause damage. Make sure that you clean your tools thoroughly before you put them in storage. It is always a good idea to coat the metal parts on your tools with a mixture of petroleum jelly and light oil in order to prevent any rusting while in storage.
Taking the time to correctly care for your backyard tools will make sure that you have them for many years to come.
Another way to correctly take care of your tools is to keep them organized. A tool organizer is a wonderful way to do this, and you can read more about my visiting http://gardentoolorganizer.org
