How Garden Machines and Garden Power Tools Can Make Gardening Easier

If your garden is large and you wish to mechanise most of the tasks in which it involves you, it is possible to buy multi-purpose garden machines with attachments that will rotavate your soil, trim your hedges, saw your timber, prune your trees, carry your loads, spray, pump, and carry out many other tasks. After all, you can only do one job at a time, so you only need one source of power, and this can be harnessed to assist you in each of these many tasks.

Garden power tools today need not be petrol driven. They can be run by electricity, either from the mains or from portable batteries. The advantages of mains electricity is that it is more or less foolproof, starts with the flick of a switch and it is blessedly quiet. On the other hand it necessitates a long cable from the house or other access point. It can be dangerous if cables are frayed or otherwise damaged or if the machine is handled carelessly. To obviate this, many garden machines can be adapted to run on a safe low voltage, supplied from the mains source but via a step-down transformer and today all machines are double insulated for the greatest possible degree of safety.

It is sometimes more convenient to use batteries. These can be very heavy, but mounted on a well balanced machine they are little heavier than a petrol driven motor. Battery driven machines are again quiet and almost as foolproof as mains electricity so long as the batteries are kept charged and in good condition. Most battery driven garden power tools or garden machines are supplied with a charger, so that at the end of a working session they require only to be plugged in to a mains point overnight to be ready for work again next morning. The batteries generally carry a charge that will enable them to be used for up to two hours, which means that if you have more than half an acre or so of lawns to mow the batteries may not last you the whole of the time. Garden machinery suppliers will always advise.

Of the attachments available for a garden machine, unquestionably the most useful is the digging equipment. This can consist of revolving rotavator blades which can dig and pulverise the soil to a depth of up to a foot or so depending on the model, or plough blades which will turn over the soil but not necessarily break it up. Only comparatively large areas of land, frequently cultivated, make these attachments economic.

It is possible in many parts of the country to hire garden machines of various types by the hour or by the day and this is a useful service when a once-only job is to be tackled, such as the ploughing of a considerable virgin area. Alternatively, more and more garden contractors are appearing on the scene parallel with the disappearance of the jobbing gardener.