Monthly Q&A - October 2023

Zack Snipes

When it comes to pruning season, trimming and shaping trees and shrubs with thick, woody growth can feel like a daunting task. While your secateurs and other essential gardening tools may not be up to the task, a strong pair of anvil garden loppers is more than capable of tackling tougher trimming jobs. Used with with both hands their long handles make them ideal for cutting branches up to 50mm thick and if you’re pruning dense dead wood, then a pair of loppers with an anvil blade is the tool for you. Cuts are made as the top blade slices through the wood onto the flat anvil base. They can crush stems as they cut and although bypass blades make cleaner, more precise cuts, anvil blades have greater force. They are ideal for clearing dead branches and making the first cut on thick branches before removing them cleanly with bypass loppers or a saw. Loppers are available with telescopic handles that extend for greater reach and most have an additional cutting mechanism to help you cut thicker wood with less effort, helpful for those with less strength and for very tough wood.

Compost is full of the nutrients your plants need, so it’s an ideal fertiliser, organic mulch, and soil improver. Just put your garden waste and some kitchen waste into a compost bin and it will break down over a year or so to reveal fresh, home-made compost.

Secateurs are an indispensable tool, essential for tidying up around the garden. While tools like hedge trimmers and other cordless garden tools are ideal for taking on heavy duty tasks, secateurs are a simple, hand-held tool used for keeping on top of pruning, dead-heading, cutting back perennials and harvesting fruit, veg and flowers. Available as bypass, anvil and ratchet, each type is designed for a particular job:

In the autumn months it’s glorious to see the leaves turn from green through to golden brown but once they start to fall and cover our gardens, it’s a different matter. While those that settle on bare ground in the veg patch and in beds can be left to rot down to act as a mulch, piles of leaves on lawns, borders, paths and patios are best cleared away to prevent them becoming a hotbed for pests and diseases or creating a dangerously slippery surface once the wet weather arrives.

Watering can be an everyday task in summer, but to ensure you use only the water you need, and that it goes just where you want it, a spray gun attached to the end of your hose is an essential piece of kit. With as many as nine different spray patterns, including a shower setting for watering borders, a mist for fragile plants and a jet spray for cleaning or filling buckets, they’re equally at home lightly misting seedlings as they are washing down a path. A hose spray gun can make light work of the most common gardening watering tasks and turn the garden hose into one of the most important tools in your garden.

It’s a classic British summertime scene: the sun’s just peeked out from behind the clouds, the temperature’s barely in double digits, but all along the street there’s the delicious smell of smoky, charcoal cooked food.

Sheds are an invaluable addition to any garden, providing storage, protection and even a space to relax. However, it’s worth making sure you match the right shed to your garden and your gardening needs. If you simply want a low-maintenance, durable garden space for storage, a metal shed may be all you need, but depending on the tools and other kit you have you might need a large apex shed, or just a garden chest. To ensure you choose the shed best suited to your needs, we’ve created this list of what we consider to be 2023’s best garden sheds, their qualities, and how they can help you.

A well kept, manicured lawn is a point of pride for gardeners and maintaining it should be one of the easiest tasks in the garden. There’s a huge choice of different mowers on the market but electric corded mowers are the most common and one of the easiest to use. They’re quiet, light and easy to manoeuvre plus they’re clean with no fuel fumes or regular servicing needed. They’re also the cheapest, but do you get what you pay for? To find out if paying less means you lose out on features or performance our gardening experts tested a range of corded electric lawn mowers that won’t break the bank.

A hose can be an essential bit of kit for a gardener, making the task of watering your garden much easier than heaving a heavy watering can back and forth from the tap. Choosing the right hose will depend on the size of your garden, how much time you spend watering and, of course, your budget. We researched the most popular garden hoses on the market and rigorously tested them to bring you our list of the 10 best garden hoses, including bare hoses, expandable hoses and garden hose reels.

A lawn mower may be one of the first purchases we make when getting a garden of our own, but that doesn’t mean finding a good quality one is easy. There are so many models and brands on the market to choose from, including corded electric and petrol, but as their range increases and prices fall, cordless, battery-powered models are an increasingly popular option.

Choosing the best lawn mower can be a tricky task, with so many models on the market and such a wide range of brands. There are five main types of mower available at hugely varying prices and all with different features that need to be considered.