Making your garden and yard tools last longer

Hand tools that you use in the yard and garden help you clean, maintain and repair — but they need some cleaning, maintaining and repairing too. A little extra attention will prolong the life of your tools.

• After use, digging tools will often be encrusted with soil.
• This will not usually promote corrosion, but will take some of the pleasure out of using the tool next time.
• The quickest way to thoroughly clean your tool is to make a pit stop at your hose and spray it clean.
• If the soil has hardened, use a stiff brush or paint scraper to remove it.
• Once or twice a season, spray or wipe the metal parts of your tools with penetrating oil to help keep them from rusting.

• It's a sad and all-too-typical story. A pair of shears, loppers or pruners gets dull and no longer cuts well.
• Then the frustrated owner relegates the tool to jobs it wasn't designed to do, like lopping off a thick dead branch.
• The excessive torque causes the tool's joint to loosen.
• Then the user tosses it or hangs it in a dark corner of the shed and forgets about it.
• Keeping your tools sharp will avoid this untimely demise — and it's easy, as long as you do it regularly.

• Sharpen all of your garden cutting tools with a file or grinder using the manufacturer's factory-set blade bevel as a guide.
• If there is no bevel on the tool, a 30-degree edge is the rule of thumb, although the bevel on pruners tends to be narrower, closer to 15 degrees.
• Be careful: If you put too sharp an edge on your tool, it will dull, dent and chip easily. If you put too blunt an edge, it will not perform efficiently.
• Don't be afraid to go to a professional to get a good precision cutting tool sharpened.
• Bright spray paint colours prevent small tool lossIt's extremely easy to leave hand garden tools, such as hatchets, bow saws and crowbars, lying in the grass, where they stay forgotten and rusting until the next time you mow the lawn.
• Jog your memory — and make them easy to spot when mowing — by spraying a streak of bright orange paint on them.

• Every time you sharpen your pruners, shears and lopping tools, put a few drops of oil on each operating joint and spring.
• Use a multipurpose oil to do the job.

• You are less like to misplace or lose your tools if you keep them with you as you move from job to job in the yard.
• If you have an old unused golf bag with a pull-cart attachment, give it new life as a roll-around carrier for your yard and garden tools.
• Store long-handled tools where you formerly kept your woods and irons, and stash your work gloves and small tools in the zipper pockets.
• An old plastic trash can with rollers can also serve as a yard tool caddy.

• Cotton garden work gloves will last longer — and be a lot more pleasant to use — if you wash them regularly.
• Washing removes abrasive dirt particles that tear at the fabric of the gloves like sandpaper.