Andrew Oldham has Christmas gift ideas in spades for the gardener in your life…
Buying for gardeners is not as easy as you think. A new pair of secateurs? Only if they are certain make. Vouchers for a garden centre? Only if they shop there. The longer a gardener has gardened, the more contrary they are. I knew a gardener who used an old kitchen knife to weed with, and his wife got him a weed wand for the big day. He sat there, unwrapping his present below the Christmas tree and looked at the state-of-the-art weed wand that would burn away those weeds. He thanked his wife, put it in his shed and continued with the knife. Why? His knife had a back story; a battered bone-handled thing that his mother had used. Every time he used it, his mother was with him. It was a gift of memory, and love, that he weeded with.
I understand this as I have tools that belonged to my dad and grandad: a trowel and hand fork, an old army knife, and I have stories around them. I rarely buy new tools because each old tool is a story passed down. Using old tools also means that they have an extended life unlike the many imported gardening tools of today that are often of poor quality. Rather than replace old with new, I hunt around.
I have a 1930s garden spade that I got off a car boot for £4 some years back with a D-handle and I love the feel of it. Yet, due to the rise of online marketplaces, many car boots around here have died away and those I trawl nowadays are full of house clearances rather than shed clearances.
I had been on the hunt for a new border spade for years, until I discovered Garden and Wood, who specialise in antique garden tools, furniture, and ephemera. I purchased a repurposed Elwell D-handled border spade for £52 including postage. Some of you may baulk at that price but let’s face some costs, the cheapest border spade will cost between £10-£20, mid-range, £30-40, and crème de la crème, £70+. Sadly, steel is not what it was, and cheap imports means cheap tools. My Elwell will be around long after these have gone, and at £52, it’s not that expensive for a lifetime.
THE EVERYDAY, USEFUL STUFF
Then there is the useful stuff that all gardeners need, posts and stakes. I never have enough of these, but they have become rather expensive, and elusive, in garden centres.
A recent visit to several garden centres to find 5-foot, 2 x 2-inch stakes, for my new dead hedge, came up dry. After a few weeks I found three in an upmarket garden centre with a price ticket of £10.40 for one. Now, don’t get me wrong but for that, I will cut down a tree myself and mill it. I needed 10 for the first section of my dead hedge and at that price, it would have quickly become too expensive. However, there are still builders’ merchants online, and I found them at £3.20.
This article extract was taken from the December 2024 edition of The Country Smallholder. To read the article in full, you can buy the issue here.
