The Best Time To Buy New Tools For The Garden

When temperatures warm up in spring, your lawn and garden beckon you to pull out your tools and toil away to make way for a summer bounty. You can picture ripe tomatoes on the vine and flowers poking through the ground as you stroll toward your tool shed. The anticipation of digging in is invigorating. So, the last thing you need right now is for your tools to be waiting for you in disrepair. Being proactive and making sure you replace tools as needed before the start of the growing season is important for a successful start. The best time to buy your tools is in the early spring before you start digging, weeding, and planting, or in the fall when you've finished for the year.

Essential gardening tools that should be maintained seasonally include pruning shears, garden forks, hand trowels, and spades. A well-cared-for lawn requires mowers, weed wackers, shovels, wheelbarrows, and rakes. Gardening gloves and hoses are also important garden accessories and should be a part of your arsenal that gets checked each season as well. After your checks, you can buy new versions of tools that are beyond repair.

In order to get a good price while also having a plethora of options, buying your tools in early spring is optimal. Stores are preparing for the warm-weather rush of shoppers, so options are plentiful even though discounts are not. Lawn mowers are a good example of this — you'll have better luck at finding a lawn mower this time of year that suits your lawncare needs because stock is abundant.

Stock dwindles in the fall, when stores stop restocking summer tools to make way for snow blowers and other cold-weather tools. They want to offload what's left by offering discounts. You may not have as much to choose from, but you have the discount to make it worth the buy. Garden tools are especially good fall purchases since you may not need to sort through multiple options like you do with lawn mowers. Let's call a spade a spade here: Shovels and rakes are pretty straightforward and don't need fancy accouterments, so you don't necessarily need to wait for a spring purchase.

Yearly garden tool maintenance is necessary to extend the life of your equipment and get the most bang for your buck. No amount of discounts on new tools will save you money quite like taking care of your current ones so they last more than one season. But sometimes you're faced with the choice of repairing or replacing. Lawn mowers are expensive to replace, but if you have a major issue that is going to cost more to fix than the mower is worth, the smart choice may be to buy a new one. However, something like a broken or dull blade can be replaced or sharpened for pennies on the dollar compared to buying new.

Occasionally, the handles of shovels break off. If it's a wooden handle, a quality wood glue may be the fix you need to keep it working for longer. Rake tines can also bend or break, which isn't a problem if it's just one or two. If you're missing enough to hinder the efficacy of the rake, it's time to replace it. Shears can be sharpened when dull, but rusted through or broken beyond repair blades require you to buy a new pair. This is when smartly timing your purchases comes in handy.