Make Gardening Easier With These Helpful Garden Tools

How does your garden grow? With ease if you use smart gardening gear for planting, watering, weeding and pruning. These helpful garden tools can help you turn on your green thumb. 

Planting

Reduce joint stress and increase leverage when gripping garden tools with the Peta Easi-Grip Long Reach Garden Tools. Each tool’s handle is more than 31 inches long to help prevent excessive bending and reaching.

Give plants hands-on attention in comfort with the Garden Kneeler/Sitter. The foam platform cushions knees and a sturdy metal frame with handles helps stabilize your movements while kneeling. When tending to raised beds, flip it over for a bench.

Watering

Forget lugging heavy watering cans. Use a lightweight coiled hose, which won’t get tangled and stretches to 50 feet and automatically rebounds to 3 feet. Or opt for a traditional hose with a contoured grip that spins at the connection point — like the Flexon Guard N Grip Hose, which earned an Arthritis Foundation Ease of Use certification. The Flexon hose makes connecting it to outdoor faucets less strenuous on hands and wrists. The Arthritis Foundation’s Ease of Use program recognizes products proven to make life easier for people with arthritis.

A nozzle with an ergonomically designed handle — like the Melnor RelaxGrip 8-Pattern Thumb Control Nozzle — makes gripping and squeezing easier, too. The unique thumb control design helped the Melnor nozzle earn an Ease of Use certification.

Turn disposable 1- and 2-liter soda bottles into an irrigation system for potted plants by attaching Aqua Cones to the threaded ends of the bottles. When inserted into the soil of a plant, an Aqua Cone’s long stake delivers water directly from the old soda bottle to the plants roots as needed, helping to cut back on your watering duties.

Weeding

Remove weeds from a standing position with Fiskars’ UpRoot Weed and Root Remover, an Ease of Use certified tool, or Hound Dog’s Weed Hound. For both, place the plunger on the weed and activate the steel tines by placing one foot on the footstep. Then lift on the handle to pull out the weed without leaving divots in your lawn or garden.

To prevent weeds from popping up in gardens use a liner, like the Pro Weed Mat. Cut the 3-by-50-foot mat in any configuration you need: in between rows of veggies, around trees and along the edges of beds.

Pruning

Rose gardeners rejoice. Prune showy roses without cutting your hands on thorns with the Rose Stem Cleaner, and safely remove thorns and leaves that lead to cloudy water in vases with the Thorn Stripper.

The extra-long gauntlets on the Bionic Rose Gloves help protect arms against thorns, but are also flexible enough to meet the needs of rose gardeners. Padding on the palm, thumb and fingers helps reduce blisters.

Fiskars’ pruners and loppers provide two-to-three times the cutting power of traditional pruning tools thanks to their unique designs that have earned 12 of Fiskars’ tools the Arthritis Foundation’s Ease of Use Commendation.

All-purpose

Tote soil, small plants and tools, and more with the nylon collapsible Presto Bucket. It weighs only a few ounces but holds almost 3 gallons.

Get more gardening tips from an avid gardener with osteoarthritis.