Heavy-Duty Gardening Tools

The rotary tiller turns dirt with a set of motor-driven blades.

Most heavy-duty garden tools aid gardeners with physically exhausting tasks, such as pruning, cutting and digging. Heavy-duty garden tools often share their design with smaller hand tools, but have sharper teeth, larger blades and increased leverage. Some heavy-duty garden tools employ motors to assist with outdoor projects. An understanding of the types of heavy-duty garden tools helps the home gardener choose tools that increase efficiency and reduce effort.

Bow Saw

Similar in appearance to a hack saw, the bow saw's thin, sharp-toothed blade hangs suspended between the open portion of a roughly L-shaped frame. Large, jagged teeth line the cutting edge of the bow saw's blade, allowing the tool to rip through thick plant limbs and trunks. When scissorlike cutting tools fail to chop through plant materials, the bow saw becomes indispensable. Bow saws are so tough that they are often used as backup tools on Christmas tree lots.

Pruning Saw

The pruning saw is a small, yet effective, alternative to the bow saw. The single-handed pruning saw's toothed blade gently curves like a scythe. The tool's blade protrudes straight from the end of a wooden, metal or plastic handle and typically folds inside of the handle, like a pocketknife. Like bow saws, pruning saws handle plant material too large for scissor tools. However, the pruning saw's size makes it suitable for areas that are too tight for the bow saw.

Lopping Shears

Lopping shears are the heavy-duty incarnation of hand pruners. Lopping shears are a scissorlike cutting tool. A pair of lopping shears consists of two hinged handles and a set of short, crescent-shaped blades. The cutting edges of lopping shears' blades are smooth and sharp. Operation of lopping shears is like using two-handed scissors; the gardener places the shears' blades around plant material and compresses the handles to slice or "lop" through the stem, branch or limb.

Rotary Tiller

The rotary tiller is one of the most common pieces of garden power equipment. Tillers lift, turn and break up garden soil, relieving the gardener of back-breaking digging by shovel. The rotary tiller usually consists of a gas-powered, internal combustion engine, a set of rotating blades, side-mounted wheels and a waist-high handle. To use the tiller, a gardener turns on the machine's motor, lowers the rotating blades into the soil and pushes the machine across the garden plot. As the gardener pushes, the tiller's rotating blades plunge in and out of the ground to cultivate the soil.

References

• Louisiana State University Ag Center: Heavy-Duty Hand Pruning Tools
• University of Vermont Extension; Garden Tools of the Trade; Leonard Perry
• Louisiana State University Ag Center: Use of a Rotary Garden Tiller