Garden Tools – Part I Gardening with Children

We all have favourite tools we get out of the shed each day, but what is the answer when a keen gardener has children they want to inspire.    Obviously for toddlers  we all buy plastic “tools” from the toy shop although when hurled through the air at siblings they can still hurt.    I was pleased that in our tool shed there were a few plastic tools obtained free on the cover of Gardeners World magazine.   I can only find a couple of plastic hand forks now but I am sure there have been a multitude of trowels too, which also did sterling service in the sandpit.    As an aside who still has the plastic trug given away on the cover of  Gardeners World many years ago?     I have two – just to be greedy!   Back to the free tools, they always seemed to work reasonably well in the hands of small children, being sturdy enough to dig a hole without damage to themselves.    However plastic tools are all well and good but can still be a bit disappointing if proper gardening is intended.    Luckily when our youngest child was around 6 or 7 we discovered Joseph Bentley Gardeners Apprentice tools.    These tools are brilliant,   lovely wooden handles and stainless steel heads.    I  favour this brand myself, preferring wooden handles to plastic or metal and stainless steel for being relatively lightweight and easy to clean.    Youngest child was very proud of his “proper tools”, over a few years that was birthdays and Christmas sorted.   In the shed we have hanging up a spade, fork, hoe, rake and leaf rake, always eagerly used when he helped us.   We did have one “breakage”, the original spade ended up with a snapped handle through over eager use so a replacement was purchased and the spade head remains in the shed, still used on occasions.  The crucial thing though was that using scaled down sturdy tools made helping with the garden much more fun and obviously safer.   There was no more disappointment because the plastic fork or spade bent if the soil was too hard or being unable to rake leaves satisfactorily with a plastic rake that didn’t have a wide enough head.    These tools are essentially the same as the grown up version just that the handles are shorter and the heads  in proportion.   What better way to help a child to garden than with a tool they can manage, enabling them to use full size tools safely as they grow older.

Of course children have a habit of growing and the small child is now a young adult, taller and stronger than me so of course when he helps out now his first port of call is the  power tools.  He has an advantage over me, he understands how to start them therefore can start them and he enjoys using them – I don’t!

So, what became of the Gardener’s Apprentice tools?    I use them!    They are great.   I don’t like back breaking digging – who does – but obviously if I am digging up something large or planting a tree a full size spade is necessary, however for  any other job which needs a spade, I favour the “child size”.      The leaf rake I’ve been using this morning.  I’m weeding and cutting back in one of the borders and this is great for raking all the debris off the soil.      We have raised beds in the vegetable garden about 3 feet wide, the small size hoe and rake are just what is needed.   With them I can till  the raised beds much more easily or maybe it’s just me that trips myself up with “proper tools” in a small space.

What an investment these tools were,  I am so glad we discovered them in time to inspire the next generation and even more glad that I can now use them as my own!