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The Best Eco-Friendly Landscaping Tools for Your Garden

8. August 2023 Katie Moody How To Articles, Lawn Care Tips, Quick Tips, Your Yard and The Earth (0)

Landscaping and gardening tools on a table

As our awareness of the environment grows, more homeowners are embracing the shift towards eco-friendly practices, particularly in their gardens. This eco-conscious movement involves incorporating tools that preserve the earth and enrich the gardening experience. And at the heart of this change? Eco-friendly landscaping tools. By utilizing these, you have the power to nurture a stunning garden that’s also kind to the planet. But what exactly makes a tool eco-friendly? Which ones are the absolute best for maintaining a greener garden? This blog will delve into these questions, offering insights and recommendations. So whether you're a seasoned gardener or a beginner, prepare to discover new ways to make your gardening habits more sustainable and environmentally friendly.

What Makes a Landscaping Tool Eco-Friendly?

Before we jump into the list of tools, let's first understand what makes a landscaping tool eco-friendly. That isn't just a label slapped on a product for marketing. There are specific factors to consider. The first is the material used. A tool made from renewable materials, like bamboo or recycled plastic, fits the bill. The second consideration is energy efficiency. Opt for tools that save energy - perhaps manual or powered by renewable sources, such as the sun. The third factor is the lifespan and recyclability of the tool. The longer a tool lasts and the more recyclable it is, the better it is for the environment. This way, we can reduce the amount of waste in landfills. So, when you're shopping, don't just skim the surface. Remember to consider the tool's entire lifecycle to make a truly eco-friendly choice.

1. Solar-Powered Lawn Mower

The solar-powered lawn mower tops our list of eco-friendly landscaping tools. These innovative machines run on renewable solar energy, making them an exceptional choice for environmentally conscious homeowners. They are perfect for tasks like prepping your lawn for winter, providing a smooth, clean cut without the carbon emissions of traditional gas mowers. Beyond their green credentials, these mowers are impressively quiet, meaning you can care for your lawn without disturbing the peace of your surroundings. Brands like EGO and Ryobi have distinguished themselves, offering top-notch solar mowers that combine efficiency, durability, and eco-friendliness. Investing in a solar-powered lawn mower gives you a well-manicured lawn and contributes to a more sustainable world. So, enjoy greener gardening with the power of the sun.

2. Bamboo Gardening Gloves

Regarding eco-friendly gardening, even the smallest change can make a big difference. One such change is switching to bamboo gardening gloves. These gloves, made from fast-growing and highly renewable bamboo, are incredibly durable. Moreover, they're comfortable, breathable, and naturally antibacterial, providing a healthy environment for your hands while you plant, prune, and perform other gardening tasks. And the best part? When their lifespan eventually ends, they break down naturally, leaving no harmful residues. Plus, they're perfect for adding new plants to your garden without damaging your hands. Brands like Burgon & Ball offer high-quality bamboo gardening gloves that combine functionality and sustainability effectively. So, let them be bamboo next time you put on your gardening gloves. You'll appreciate the comfort, and the planet will thank you for your eco-friendly choice.

3. Manual Reel Mower

If you're looking for tools that provide an efficient way to maintain an eco-friendly lawn, a manual reel mower might just be the tool for you. These mowers don't rely on gas or electricity. Instead, they use good old human power. That makes them energy-efficient and carbon-free, providing a clean, precise cut that lawn care enthusiasts often prefer. These mowers are an excellent way to have an eco-friendly lawn without compromising quality. Brands like Fiskars and Scotts manufacture manual reel mowers that are user-friendly and effective, perfect for giving your lawn a well-groomed appearance. Switching to a manual reel mower is a step towards more sustainable gardening practices. It reduces your carbon footprint and brings the bonus of a light workout while you keep your lawn looking its best.

4. Recycled Plastic Watering Can

Watering your garden is a daily task, but have you considered doing it the eco-friendly way? Opting for a recycled plastic watering can is a simple but impactful choice. These cans are crafted from reclaimed plastic, reducing waste and offering a second life to materials that would otherwise end up in landfills. But don't let the term "recycled" mislead you. These cans are as durable and functional as any other, with the added benefit of being environmentally friendly. Brands like Stewart Garden create stylish, vibrant options that can add a touch of color to your gardening routine. By incorporating a recycled plastic watering can into your daily gardening tasks, you take an easy but significant step towards more sustainable living. It's a small change with a big environmental payoff.

5. Biodegradable Plant Pots

The last item on our list is biodegradable plant pots. These are simple yet revolutionary ways to eliminate excess plastic waste. They are made from organic materials like coir, peat, or cow manure; these pots decompose naturally over time and blend back into the earth, enriching the soil. They're a gardener's dream, offering an effortless transition from pot to garden for your plants. Additionally, they reduce the use of plastic and the associated waste. Biotabs and UPM are leading the way in providing quality biodegradable plant pots.

Implementing Eco-Friendly Practices in Your Landscaping

Eco-friendly landscaping goes beyond using green tools; it involves adopting practices contributing to a healthier environment. One such practice is composting your kitchen waste. This natural method enriches your soil, providing plant nutrients and reducing waste. Then there's water conservation, an essential in any garden. Techniques like rainwater harvesting can help maintain your garden's lush appearance while reducing water waste. You can also resort to natural pest control methods. For example, using neem oil instead of chemical pesticides can help you manage pests effectively without harming the environment. If you're moving into a new home and considering adding a garden, these practices can guide you in planting greenery in your new place and starting a sustainable garden. Remember, your garden is a part of the broader ecosystem, and these eco-friendly practices ensure it contributes positively.

Conclusion on the Best Eco-Friendly Landscaping Tools

Embracing eco-friendly landscaping tools is not just a trend. It's also a step towards a sustainable future. As homeowners, we hold significant power to make a difference in our environment. The choices we make, the tools we use, and the practices we adopt in our gardens - all contribute to the larger picture of environmental conservation. The tools we've discussed, from solar-powered mowers to biodegradable plant pots, are effective in their purpose and kind to the planet. They can help you with every gardening task, from mowing the lawn to ridding your garden of pests; all in an eco-friendly way.

Photo Credit: Unsplash.com

Maximizing Your Hedge Trimmer's Performance: Best Practices for a Perfectly Manicured Yard

26. July 2023 Katie Moody General Industry News, How To Articles, Lawn Care Tips, Quick Tips (0)


A perfectly manicured yard can take a home's aesthetic to the next level. After all, it is your front yard that people will notice when they take in the exterior of your home. Therefore, it is in your best interest to ensure that your yard is beautiful, well-trimmed, and taken care of. For this purpose, your hedge trimmer will play a vital role. Hedge trimmers are valuable and reliable tools that can help you transform your yard. They allow you to carefully trim and prune hedges and bushes, allowing you to shape them into your desired shape. This can make your garden look presentable with efficiency. However, you must ensure your hedge trimmer is in tip-top condition. Otherwise, it will not operate properly, so it will not trim hedges and bushes properly. You may even notice a problem when checking it through a digital meter. Therefore, ensuring that your hedge trimmer is at peak performance is in your best interest. In this article, we will provide you with the best practices to ensure that you can maximize your trimmer's performance. Without further delay, let's dive in.
Ensure The Blades Are Sharp
Since hedge trimmers are used to prune hedges and bushes, the condition of the blades is crucial for the tool's performance. The sharper the blades are, the more effective and precise the trimming will be. If you do not keep your blades sharp, you will notice that the hedges are not being pruned accurately and may look out of shape. Eventually, the blades may even begin to fail to trim, resulting in your hedge trimmer being ineffective. Therefore, you must regularly keep your blades sharp.
We recommend taking them to an expert who can sharpen the blades when you feel that they are due servicing. Alternatively, you can learn to sharpen the blades using a whetstone and sharpening file. There are extensive tutorials available that can help you understand how you can sharpen your trimmer's blades.
Keep the Blades and Trimmer Clean
When you use a hedge trimmer to prune bushes, there will likely be a mess afterwards. After all, your garden consists of various pieces of debris made up of dirt, mud, twigs, leaves, sap, etc. This debris can get stuck on the blades of your trimmer after you are done pruning your garden. If you do not clean the blades, this debris can build up and get stuck between them, slowing their performance. Eventually, this buildup can become large enough to stall the blades and make the trimmer ineffective. Cleaning the blades regularly will ensure that your blades move at peak performance.
Additionally, the blades and other parts of the trimmer can get stained by this debris. This debris can dull the blades and damage the components of your trimmer. Therefore, you must keep your hedge trimmer clean. We recommend that you clean off the debris after using it. After that, use a cloth and a suitable cleaner to spray and clean the blades until they are shiny and spotless. This will help maintain your hedge trimmer and ensure its peak performance.
Lubricate The Blades
Cleaning your blades will keep them sharp, but it is also important that you lubricate the blades. This is because your blades will be exposed to contaminants besides debris that can cause erosion and dull the blades. Lubricating the blades adds a layer of protection between your blades and these contaminants. This lubrication will also help counter friction when the blades come into contact with hedges during pruning. This ensures that your hedge trimmer will work at peak performance. We recommend lubricating the blades after proper cleaning to ensure no debris is causing erosion underneath the lubrication.
Maintain The Air Filter
The air filter is a crucial component as it ensures that cool and clean air is provided to the motor for it to function. The filter ensures that particles, dust, and other contaminants do not flow inside by blocking them when air flows through. These particles can gradually build up within the air filter as you use the hedge trimmer. If you do not clean the air filter, the particles may build up too much, which can restrict airflow to the motor leading to overheating and poor performance. Therefore, you must regularly clean the air filter to ensure that your trimmer continues operating optimally. You should check out your manual, as it will guide you on releasing the air filter for cleaning.
In Conclusion
A hedge trimmer is an essential gardening tool that can transform a yard into a perfectly manicured one. Therefore, you want to ensure that your hedge trimmer operates at peak efficiency and performance, providing the best results when pruning bushes. This article has looked at the best practices you should apply to maximize your trimmer's performance. We recommend that you apply these to ensure you have the best gardening results. Thank you for reading!

5 Tips to Properly Maintain Your Tools

15. December 2022 Jassica Mendez How To Articles, Quick Tips (0)

You cannot maintain a decent home without having the proper tools. Unless you wish to call a handyman for every little thing, you will need to get a decent set of tools and use them periodically. Unfortunately, some devices can be pretty expensive. And while most homeowners understand the value of having proper tools, not all know how to maintain them. This is why we will use this article to give you five ways to properly maintain your tools and ensure they will serve you for years.

How to Properly Maintain Your Tools

Proper tools maintenance is by no means arduous. Once you understand the basics of it, you will be able to keep your tools in pristine condition with relative ease. What's important is that you always adhere to these methods, as forgoing them can cause your tools to deteriorate quite quickly.

Clean After Use

The first rule to adhere to is that you need to clean your tools after use. How much you will have to clean them depends on the tools and what you used them for. But a good rule of thumb is that they must be in the same condition as before usage.

Protect From Moisture

Moisture is the most common destroyer of household tools. Especially when it comes to metal ones, yes, they can break, bend, or chip. But nothing causes such irreparable damage as moisture. Therefore, if you wish to maintain your tools properly, it is paramount that you keep them away from moisture. If you keep them in a shed, ensure no rain can seep in. If you keep them in a basement, make sure that a sudden flood won't touch them. All in all, try to predict various circumstances and see that your tools won't come into contact with moisture. This is important to remember if you plan to store or transport your tools. Seeing that you won't be able to dry them off quickly, you need to know how to get them ready for transport or storage and pack your power tools so that poor weather won't cause problems.

Proper Storage

Moisture, temperature fluctuations, dirt, and even some common pests. All can cause damage to your tools. This is why it is paramount that you find proper storage for them. While it may seem that any old shed will do, we invite you to think again. Consider all the hazards that can come about and how they can damage your tools. In almost all cases, investing in decent storage is much more cost-efficient than risk damage. A tool shed can be enough. But it would help if you made sure to insulate it properly. If you have valuable tools, you might look to invest in some extra safety measures. A dingy old lock might not be as protective as you might think.

Properly Stored Tools

You need to have decent, well-organized storage if you wish to properly maintain your tools.

Learn How To Use Them Properly

Tools are meant to be used. And to make full use of them, you need to understand how and when they are meant to be used. You'd be surprised at how often people forgo doing basic research and misuse their tools. This causes them to waste their energy and puts their tools in danger. If you don't use your tools properly, you can hardly hope they will last a long time. So, whatever tool you have, and however confident you feel about it, try to do a bit of research. It is always best to use the tools as they were intended to be used.

* If you don't clean painting tools after using them, you can consider them ruined.

Even if you feel that some dirt won't harm the tool in question, we would still advise you to clean it properly. Doing so will keep your tool primed and ready for subsequent usage. And you will maintain the helpful habit of keeping your tools clean. The more you see this as something that has to be done, the more likely your tools will last for decades to come.

Keep Them Sharp

If a tool has an edge, that edge needs to be sharp. Regardless of how often you use the tools or how precise your cuts need to be, keeping blades sharp is in your best interest. Again, there are multiple reasons for this. The sharper the edge of a tool is, the less force you need to apply for it to be effective. As a result, you will save energy and put less stress on your tool.

Secondly, understand that sharpening is a skill. While there are sharpening tools that can aid you, none can substitute a sharpening stone. The more you use one, the better you will be at it. So, don't forgo a bit of practice simply because you feel you won't use the tool soon. Finally, it is essential to remember that you never know when you will need to use a tool and whether you will have the time to sharpen it. And regardless of what DIY project you have in mind, you will need a sharp tool.

Therefore, it is best to keep your tools sharp, then hope you will have enough time and patience to sharpen them before use.

Final Thoughts

As you can see, there is not much you need to understand or do to properly maintain your tools. What you need is just some common sense. And a bit of responsibility for your property. Therefore, we are still surprised at how often people ruin their tools simply due to a lack of care. If you've already decided to own and use tools, don't do so haphazardly. Make sure that you understand what they are about. And make sure that you know how to use them properly.

Credits:
https://www.pexels.com/photo/set-of-tool-wrench-162553/
https://www.pexels.com/photo/crop-craftsman-grinding-chisel-on-machine-5973846/
https://www.pexels.com/photo/paint-rollers-lying-on-a-wooden-floor-5583115/
https://www.pexels.com/photo/background-blank-business-craft-301703/

Time is Money - Keeping Extra Parts On Your Trailer

10. September 2016 Ed Landscape Contractor Articles, Quick Tips (0)

If there is one thing experience can teach us in running a landscape business it is the importance of time. It doesn’t matter if you run a multi truck operation or you are just a one Truck one trailer kind of guy. Your time is worth money.

If you’re the one truck one trailer I would think your time is even more valuable as you do not have the same resources a large scale operation would have. In most cases landscaping is a part time job for you so the days you are out mowing you cannot be dealing with down machines or something breaking on the job.

If you are the mid to large scale operation every time your crews are spending more time hanging out at the dealership versus on the job site the money you are billing for is going right out the window.

Think about this for a second. You are on a lawn and break a belt or recoil. If you are lucky it happens as you are putting the machine back on the truck but if it happens when you get there or in the middle of the job your whole day just changed, causing you to lose time which equals money. A trip to the dealer to pick up the repair part could be 30 minutes, because as you know when you have to be somewhere you will get stuck behind someone who hasn’t figured out yet how to push the gas pedal. So now you are at the dealership, it could take another 15 to 20 minutes to get the part provided it is in stock. Then another 30 minutes back to the job. So if you are lucky you only wasted and hour and a half getting the part never mind installing it.

So where does that Hour and a half maybe two go? Well, you either need to hustle to make it up or it is lost forever. What do you bill an hour? Does throwing out $60 maybe $75 dollars sound good?

Now imagine if you had kept a few repair parts on your trailer. In the case of a belt breaking simply walking to the trailer and putting on a new one just saved you an hour. Not only did you save time and money by not leaving the job you also maintained a level of professionalism that does not go unnoticed by your customers that could lead to future business. So Not only did you save that $60 dollars in waste travel but you may have also preserved future income.

This just scratches the surface of the other hidden little costs that you saved on just by having a few parts in stock. Wear and tear on the truck, traffic, gas, professionalism and your own sanity for the long haul are just some things to mention.

Take a small inventory of your machines, Look at the stuff that could break, items you always replace and keep and extra one or two. In most cases if you buy in bulk you will save a few extra cents here and there. Most big companies think like this and make great profits, No reason you can’t do the same.

As the saying goes. Time is money. Corny but seems to make sense here.

The Best Eco-Friendly Landscaping Tools for Your Garden

Maximizing Your Hedge Trimmer's Performance: Best Practices for a Perfectly Manicured Yard

5 Tips to Properly Maintain Your Tools

Time is Money - Keeping Extra Parts On Your Trailer

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