If you’ve hung around North Coast Gardening for any length of time, you know that I’m a sucker for tools that do multiple jobs well.
This hedging shear is my go-to tool for cutting back perennials in fall and winter, pruning ornamental grasses and sword ferns in winter, and deadheading heathers and other plants that respond well to shearing. Yeah, you can also use it for hedging your boxwood into the shape of a rooster, if you wish. You gotta have a little fun in life, right?
You can see how it works in this video:
The best thing about the Fiskars Powergear Hedger is the metal used and the coating on the metal, both of which help the shears cut cleanly and stay sharp, and the gears that allow it to cut through much thicker stems than most pruning shears do (if you’ve tried using regular hedging shears to cut back perennials, you know it isn’t all that effective – the gear on this one makes all the difference!).
Lightweight’s the name of the game for this pole pruner. I’ve been using these Fiskars Pruning Stiks for many years in my landscaping business and have not yet broken or had to retire one.
Many pole pruners fail because they try to do too much – they have a saw, a lopper, they extend, and thus they are heavy as sin and impossible to use for any length of time.
Maybe you’ve seen these pole pruner monstrosities – with a rope or chain looping from stick to lopper blade (ever get that rope caught in a branch that’s too tall to get to? UNCOOL, dudes.) and a saw that is difficult to maneuver at best and is asking for it at worst (try making a proper pruning cut from ten feet below – better yet, try guiding that branch to land someplace besides your head when you’re standing below it to prune!).
This is why I like the Pruning Stik. The rope that pulls the blade closed is flat and sits tightly against the pole itself, so it never gets caught in trees, it cuts branches up to an inch diameter with ease (larger if it’s soft wood), and it’s lightweight and so easy to adjust that I can prune with it for an hour without getting too tired. It weighs less than two pounds!
If you have vines, small trees or shrubs that need seasonal touchup, apple trees where you want to shorten last year’s shoots to encourage more fruit – anything where you’re pruning smallish branches for an extended period of time – pick up this Pruning Stik and save your body some stress.
If you’ve hung out at North Coast Gardening for a while, you know I have some, ahem, opinions about gardening tools. Felcos? Forget it!
But sometimes my favorite tools are a bit harder to find – they aren’t all on Amazon, nor are many of them at your local garden shop. So I’m really excited to [...]
I had a blast recently seeing Amy Stewart speak in person at our local bookstore about her book, Wicked Plants. I’d seen her previously at our local garden show, but this was even cooler because the bookstore owner provided some wicked drinks for us all – gin and tonics using a fancy tonic water with [...]
I think of video games as mostly time-wasters and try to avoid them, but every so often one comes along that is so extremely fun that it’s hard to resist. Plants VS Zombies hits two of my favorite things – the ridiculous charm and kitsch of zombies combined with the over-the-top sunniness of plants.
You start [...]
I’m a huge fan of Amy Stewart, and I’ve read everything she’s written, including her bimonthly gardening column in our local newspaper and her writing at Garden Rant, so I was thrilled when I heard about her latest book, Wicked Plants.
I’m a professional gardener and a total plant geek, so reading all about the wicked [...]
OK, so this isn’t strictly gardening, but all ya’ll should know by now what a rabid fan of Amy Stewart I am. I love her writing on Garden Rant, I love Wicked Plants and the rest of her non-fiction books, and I love her chicken paintings. So when I heard she had released her new [...]
Read to the end of the article to find out how you can win an autographed copy of Wicked Plants!
Y’all know by now what a huge fan I am of Amy Stewart and her writing. As a plant geek, I love how accurate she is about the plants’ details (so many writers get basic [...]
Wrapping up our series on the hand tools we use most in gardening, I want to show you my favorite sharpening tool, the Speedy Sharp, and how to use it to sharpen your pruning shears and your soil knife or hori-hori:
Now, if you prefer to use a file to sharpen your shears, Fine Gardening has [...]
Weeding is one of those perennial garden tasks – we all do it, all year long, and while there are sprays and tools we can use from a standing position, most weeding is done from the ground, with a trowel or trowel-like object.
You may have noticed that my years of doing garden maintenance have given [...]
for many years in 
