“Exercise, from a public health perspective, is an unmitigated failure. The world’s longest-lived people live in enviroments that nudge them into more movement. They don’t use power tools, they do their own yard work, they grow a garden.

The story that always comes to mind regarding garden power tools and manual tools is when I owned a full service landscape business. We were just finishing up a job and the pull cord on the backpack blower broke. Ok, no big deal right? We always carried more than one blower with us to the jobs. We grab the second blower in a hurry as it begins to sprinkle with a late afternoon southern thunderstorm soon to follow. Pull! Pull! Pull! NOTHING! No matter what we tried it would not start. So, me being the boss with all the answers told the guys to grab the brooms. They looked at me as if they did not know what a broom is. No joke. Once they realized I WAS NOT JOKING they begin to whine about how long it would take to clean the area with a broom. Manually. Now mind you I started yard work at age 6 in my older brother’s neighborhood lawn business. There were no string trimmers, stick edgers, or blowers back then. So yes, life goes on without a blower. 

One thing we older gardeners must do is teach the younger gardening generation what the manual tools are and how to use them. We will review a few of those here. Please comment on your favorite manual gardening tools.