Garden Tool Care and Maintenance
How to Get Your Garden Tools in Ship Shape!
Before we know it, we’ll be right into the thick of gardening season in Powell River. If you haven’t given your garden tools a bit of care and maintenance yet, now is the time to get it done. A little bit of cleaning, conditioning, and sharpening every year will keep your garden tools in great shape for years to come. And if you do it every year, it’s a pretty quick task to get everything clean and sharp.
Taking care of your garden tools includes some basic maintenance like cleaning, sharpening, and conditioning them. It’s a pretty simple process, but there are a couple of supplies we would suggest picking up before you get started:
- 6″ mill file
- Carbide file
- 3-in-1 penetrant oil
- Boiled linseed oil
- Wire brush
- Steel wool
- Solvent
- Hydrophobic grease (if you’re going to take tools fully apart)
Cleaning and Sharpening Large Garden Tools
The first care step is to wash your garden tools in hot water and soap, then dry them well. If there’s any sap on the garden tools, use a solvent product to get it off. It may need to soak for a few minutes. After you’ve soaked the tools to soften any stuck on grime, use a metal wool scouring pad to scrub off any remaining dirtiness and rust, then rinse and dry the tools again.
If possible, secure your tool’s handle in a vise before you start to sharpen, so you can apply consistent pressure and don’t have to worry about slipping and cutting yourself.
Once your garden tool is secure, find the beveled edge and, using a mill file, apply even pressure in quick strokes away from the blade, at about a 45º angle, all the way around the edge of the tool. Never drag the file back across your edge, as it will ruin your sharp edge and could damage the file as well.
When you’ve reached your desired sharpness, check for burrs or bumps along the opposite side of the tool. If you find any bumps or burrs, use the file, held almost flat against the tool, to smooth them out in a gentle back and forth motion, applying even pressure throughout.
Once your garden tool has reached the desired sharpness, use a cloth to apply a light layer of oil over the metal. Boiled linseed oil is usually used for handles, but you can also use it on metal. This layer of oil will help to prevent rust.
Next, check any wooden handles on large garden tools. Slide your hands the full length of the handle to check for any rough spots or splintering. Take care not to pick up any slivers in your hands. If you find rough spots, smooth them out with sandpaper. Once the wood handles of your garden tools are smooth, use a cloth to apply a thin layer of boiled linseed oil to condition the handles.
If you have big rust spots on a garden tool’s blade, you can use a steel brush to get them off. Once you’ve got them cleaned up as much as you can with the brush, finish the job with a steel wool pad.
Sharpening Garden Hand Tools
Wash your smaller garden tools, like hand pruners, in hot soapy water as well. Use a solvent to soak through any leftover grime that doesn’t come off with regular washing. Once the product has soaked for a bit, a wire brush works best to scrub off things like stuck-on sap since the brush can get into all the small tight spots. Follow up with steel wool to buff the metal parts, rinse your garden tools again and dry them thoroughly.
A small carbide file is one of the easiest ways to sharpen small tools. Stabilize the pruners in one hand, and hold the file, in your other hand, at an angle on the beveled edge of the pruner. Take care to line up your sharpener at approximately the same angle as the existing bevel. Start from the bottom of the blade and move the file across the length of the blade in a sweeping motion several times, with consistent pressure.
Check the blade for sharpness as you go. Once the edge feels sharp, flip the tool over and check for any burrs, or little bumps, on the flat side. If there are burrs, use the carbide file across that side a couple of times to smooth it out. Hold the file as close to flat against the flat of the blade to smooth out the burrs without damaging the sharp edge you’ve created.
Once your hand tools are sharp, apply a 3-in-1 penetrant oil over the moving parts. This important care step will lubricate the mechanisms, prevent rust, and loosen any stuck bits. Open and close the pruners a few times to make sure the oil works into all the moving bits.
If you have old tools that are really rusted from lack of care and maintenance, you may need to take them apart completely. Just make sure you take pictures of how things go together before you start to take them apart, so you know how to put them back together.
Take care to keep track of all the small bits, like washers and screws, so you don’t lose them. They may need to be cleaned as well or replaced. Make sure you get the rust off of every part. You may need to clean, scrub, and soak them several times to get them cleaned up.
At the very least, annual tool maintenance should include cleaning your tools well at the end of the season before you put them away for winter. Once they’re clean, wiping them down with a light layer of oil will keep them protected from rust all winter.
You can leave sharpening until spring if you like or don’t have time in the fall. But even just putting them away cleaned and oiled will make it a lot faster to sharpen them up in the spring and get right back to gardening.
Dealing with really dirty tools can make tool maintenance seem like a massive job because it can take quite a long while to get really rusty tools into usable shape again. Still, if you keep up with annual tool maintenance, it will become a reasonably quick process since they won’t get as dirty or dull in just one year.