I review these products during tasks I personally carry out within my garden on a regular basis. Using the right product or tool for the job makes the difference of doing it the easy way or the hard way, so I really value a product which can make my life easier.

I am hoping that garden related companies will send me ‘products’ to test and evaluate. However I must stress that I will not be anything but fair and make no promises to these companies other than to tell the truth. Many of the products here are what I have already purchased for my own gardening use and are happy with.
You may ask, what are your qualifications? Well Judy and I opened our garden through the ‘Australia's Open Gardens’ for
10 years. We now open to support a specific charity.
We had our 18th Open Garden in 2019.
We won Gardening Australia’s 2009 ‘Golden Trowel’, have appeared on the ‘Garden Guru’s and ‘Gardening Australia’ twice and on various other television shows. We have given over 200 presentations to garden clubs on Sub tropical gardening and open our garden for bus tours. What is more important is that we have learnt from our gardening mistakes.

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Garden Lopper

We have over 70 fruit trees in our yard and of course they all need to be kept under control.
That means a lot of trimming, cutting and lopping.
When it comes to garden tools my motto is 'only the best will do'.
That's why I like brands such as Fiskars and Felco.
I have now had a chance to try out the medium Fiskars lopper's and they are up to the usual high quality.
Fiskars say: The unique Power-Gear™ mechanism increases cutting power and distributes it evenly throughout the cutting action. The PowerStep™ technology allows gardeners to cut branches in 1, or multiple steps. It makes the workload easier on young and senior gardeners alike, eliminating strain and pain to increase the overall pleasure of gardening.

Fiskars loppers are made of fibreglass reinforced polyamide, which makes them lightweight and strong. The cutting blades are PTFE- coated for less friction. The loppers are available in three different models:

It took no effort to trim the 'Fruit of the Rio Grande and Gruminchama.

The loppers cut through the branches like a knife through butter, no effort was required.
I have quite a few Fiskars products, I especially like the loppers and telescopic pruners.
These products are NOT made in China, they are made in Finland and are of a very high quality.
Do not buy cheap garden tools as you are not only wasting your money but are using an inferior product that will probably not do the job that you wanted it to do.
Here you will find a small movie of the cutters at work.
http://ianjudy.blogspot.com.au/

Saturday, May 5, 2012

Stanley Wheelbarrow

My good old rugged Kelso wheelbarrow ended it's life about two months ago after years of really hard work.
What a wonderful rugged and reliable barrow.
Why did I not get another Kelso?
I was stupid, thought more about cost than quality and went to Bunnings and bought a Stanley Wheelbarrow.
To start off with all the nuts and bolts needed tightening and the bearings needed greasing.
Then when I started to use the barrow to cart garden soil it was nowhere as easy as the Kelso to push, also it creaks and groans and is unstable.
I did a bit of concreting the other day and with only six shovel loads of mixed cement the barrow bin started to go out of shape and almost collapsed on me.

As you can see all the nuts and bolts have started to fall off, makes you wonder why they did not put on spring washers, now I have to go and buy new bolt's nut's and washers, not happy.
How cheap and shoddy is this.
I wish I had kept my Bunning's receipt then I could of taken it back and changed it to a better one.
I absolutely hate this wheelbarrow but will keep it as it will only last a couple of years (if I am lucky), then I will get a good, one not cheap Chinese rubbish.
To make matters worse the inner tube split, so that was another $20 dollars for a new tube, not to mention the hassle of putting it in.
Sorry about this Mr Stanley but it's not a good product, in fact it's a load of cheap rubbish.
As of December 2013 over 2000 people have read this post.
http://ianjudy.blogspot.com.au/