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.
Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’ is a true garden classic, especially paired with ornamental grasses, lavenders and colorful sages.
It’s particularly great because during the summer when everything else is blooming, its greenish-white buds are getting bigger and bigger, creating a subtly beautiful show, then as everything else slows for the fall, ‘Autumn Joy’ bursts into bloom with [...]
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 [...]
My new blogging friend Karl wrote me recently to rave about his favorite gardening tool, the Fiskars Big Grip Knife. It just so happened that I had just recorded a video and written my own review of my two favorite weeding tools, and after I included his review with mine, he wrote a follow-up post [...]
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 [...]
Many people avoid wearing gloves and knee pads to garden because they see these kinds of protective gear as getting between them and the experience of gardening. Either kneeling pads pinch the backs of your legs uncomfortably, or you can’t feel what you’re doing while wearing gloves.
That’s totally valid, but there are things you [...]
This week, we’re honoring our love of gardening by taking a hard look at our rusty, underperforming hand tools, and seeing if there might be a better way to approach our routine gardening tasks.
All right, so I know pruners are a sensitive topic among us gardeners. We all have our favorites and god help the [...]
This week, we’re honoring our love of gardening by taking a hard look at our rusty, underperforming hand tools, and seeing if there might be a better way to approach our routine gardening tasks.
Gardeners really vary on how we like to deal with the trimmings and weeds we create when doing the rounds in our [...]
for many years in 
