Power Tools for the Spring Garden Clean-Up

Has winter left your property a tangled mess of fallen branches and leaf piles? Or perhaps you're eager to kickstart your summer with new garden beds and bidding farewell to that stubborn tree stump. Whatever the case may be, power garden tools are your best companion for the job.

 

Chainsaws and chippers

During winter it’s likely that your property experienced some rough weather. Trees and branches fall victim to winter storms, while flurries of dead leaves congregate into giant mounds.

If that sounds like your place, a chainsaw and a chipper will come in handy. Branches can be fed directly into a chipper. All wood chippers have a fuel-powered engine, and should only be used outside. 

Chippers come in sizes from 100 to 300mm, which refers to the size of the opening. If you have a lot of branches or leaves, the wider opening is preferable.

Chainsaws come in handy to divide tree trunks into sections, since these cannot be fed into the chipper. They also come in handy for removing dead palm fronds and branches that are threatening to break.

For dead high-hanging palm fronds, a pole trimmer is indispensable. This is a cordless electric cutter with a serrated blade on the end of a pole that telescopes to reach up high.

Once you’ve put your garden waste through the chipper, you can store it and use it as mulch for the garden. This is a great way of recycling the carbon that’s stored in the plants back into the soil. Mulch also acts as a protective layer for your soil, preventing wind erosion, and trapping moisture.

 

Hedge trimmers, leaf blowers and trailers

Trimming garden hedges is an important rite of spring, encouraging new growth and redefining the hedge’s shape so it offers better privacy and looks nice.

Powered hedge trimmers can be battery or petrol driven and come with different sized blades and handle extensions for narrow or broad hedges. They are light and are ideal for pruning bushes and shrubs as well as trimming hedges.

After you’ve chain-sawed, wood-chipped and hedge-trimmed, you probably have a mess of stray leaves and twigs lying around, as well as what’s left over from last autumn. Leaf blowers blast these into manageable piles, can be battery or petrol driven and are gentler on the grass than an inefficient manual rake.  

Once you’ve collected your leaves and bits together, you may decide to take them to the tip in a trailer. Box trailers have low sides for smaller loads, but you can also hire cage trailers for stacking up larger items – like anything too big to go through the mulcher. 

 

Mini loaders for easy lifting

If you decide to level some ground to create a new garden bed or you want to shift some rocks around to make a terrace garden, you might consider a mini loader. These versatile little machines are great for moving and levelling soil, mulch, sand and screenings, or loading trailers, trucks and bins.

You don’t need a special licence to operate one, and your Kennards Hire team will give you an instruction manual and some hands-on practical instruction before you load the mini loader onto a trailer and take it home. 

 

Lawn trimmers and aerators

After dealing with the trees and shrubs, you can turn your attention to the grass. Spring means new growth, requiring air and water, and if your lawn has become compacted and dry over winter, you may need to aerate.

Next, turn your attention to the lawn’s edges. If you want a clear line between your lawn and an adjacent space, you get best results with a line trimmer. These machines trim lawn edges along walls and fences as well as footpaths, driveways and garden beds. An aerator-corer is a self-propelled machine designed to allow air into the grass root system. Its tines pull narrow tubes of earth out and drop them back on the lawn. This helps with water penetration and helps fertiliser enter the soil to promote grass growth. 

This list of power garden tools is by no means exhaustive, but it’s a good start. Consider hiring one or more of these tools during your spring clean to lick your garden into shape.

Kennards Hire makes garden clean-up easy, helping turn spring cleaning from a tedious manual chore with mixed results, to an exercise in machine-driven perfection.