Efficiently Prepare Your Garden Beds With A Simple Drill Attachment

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A power drill is one of the most popular and useful tools a homeowner can have. The best drills for use at home offer versatility for making repairs, building new items, and performing renovations. You can make your power drill even more versatile by purchasing different attachments and accessories for it. Among the handy drill attachments you may wish you bought sooner for bigger jobs are a scrub brush or pad, a paint mixer, or even a log splitter. When you're ready to use the drill outdoors in your garden bed, one popular attachment you can find for a reasonable price at Amazon is the TCBWFY Auger Drill Bit ($10). This attachment measures just over 16 inches in length and has a 1.6-inch diameter spiral auger at the end of the attachment.

A plant auger can make your next garden project easier by speeding up the planting process, simplifying weeding, and loosening soil throughout the garden bed. One Amazon reviewer who has hard, clay soil said this plant auger saved time and effort when digging. "This has been a game changer for planting in my garden," the reviewer said. Another reviewer said the auger is easy to use when digging holes to plant flowers. It's also safer to use around existing plants than a shovel, according to one Amazon customer reviewer. It "makes planting somewhat easier, especially in existing beds where you don't want to dig up close plants in the process of planting new ones," the reviewer said.

Although most people use this auger to create holes to add plants and bulbs to the garden bed, a few other uses are possible. Some people use the auger to create holes near plants in the garden to easily add fertilizer spikes or granular fertilizer. You could also use the auger to create your own DIY liquid fertilizer. Although several different recipes exist for liquid fertilizer, one that's easy to make consists of grass clippings, processed poultry manure, and water-diluted urine. If you're mixing these ingredients in a large size, such as in a gallon bucket, it can be difficult to mix them properly without spilling. Rather than shaking the bucket and risking spills, use the garden auger on a low speed to mix the ingredients thoroughly before letting the mixture sit at room temperature for a couple of days.

Another task for which you can use the plant auger is simplifying pulling huge weeds with deep roots. Make a hole and loosen the soil at a few spots around the stubborn weed before trying to pull it. One Amazon reviewer recommended attacking the weed head-on with the auger. "You pierce it through the middle of a weed, pull the trigger on your cordless drill, and most times that weed just curls up on the auger, root and all," the reviewer said.

One common problem Amazon reviewers mentioned with the plant auger is that it may struggle to create deep holes in packed soil. If you don't have a powerful drill, you might have to stick to using it for smaller jobs. The TCBWFY auger ships with black paint over its length to protect the steel from rust. However, a few Amazon reviewers said the paint is so thick at the top of the auger attachment (where it goes inside the drill) that it sometimes slips out of place. The thick paint may also prevent you from adding extension bits to gain more depth from the auger. One reviewer removed some of the paint to fix the issue.

Some reviewers said the auger can get stuck in hard soil, and you can't back it out. "It got stuck in the ground, and when [I] tried to back out, it came loose. So I then had to dig around to free it from the dirt," one Amazon reviewer said. One reviewer developed a workaround for this problem by drilling a few inches and lifting the auger out of the ground. Clean the dirt off it and start drilling again, continuing to stop every few inches for cleaning.