The Five Tools a Small Garden Needs

A balcony or a six-metre yard needs five tools, and the selection rule is simple: can it be taken apart and sharpened. A bypass pruner with replaceable blades outlasts four sealed ones and cuts better in year five than the sealed one did in week one.

The list

• Bypass pruners — replaceable blade, replaceable spring. The spring is what fails first and costs £4.
• A hand fork — one forged piece, not a socketed head. Socketed heads work loose in clay.
• A folding saw — for anything over 20 mm, which pruners will crush rather than cut.
• A 2-litre watering can with a rose — small enough to lift full, which means it gets used.
• A dibber or a pencil — genuinely interchangeable.

Sharpening, in four minutes

Bypass pruners are sharpened on the outer bevel of the cutting blade only — never the flat inner face, and never the anvil. Ten strokes with a diamond card at the existing angle, wipe, one drop of oil at the pivot. If the cut leaves a crushed tail on a green stem, the blades are misaligned rather than blunt, and the pivot bolt needs a quarter turn.

A blunt pruner does not just cut badly, it cuts dirtily. Torn tissue is where the dieback starts.

What we would not buy again

Ratcheting pruners: slow, and the mechanism fills with sap. Telescopic loppers for a small space: the joint flexes exactly when you need leverage. Anything with a sealed rivet instead of a bolt, at any price, because that rivet is the manufacturer deciding when your tool expires.