How often should you sharpen and oil your garden tools?

Why bother

Damp, dirty tools rust over winter and the rot is permanent. A thorough-tier job. Skippable when life's busy, worth it when it isn't.

Why it's a range

Once a year, in the fall before everything goes into storage, covers most gardens. Sharpening on its own flexes with use: a light user gets a year out of an edge, while someone out there daily touches up the pruners every few weeks, or whenever the cuts stop coming out clean.

What the job involves

1. Scrub the soil and dried sap off each tool with a wire brush or steel wool, wash with soapy water (turpentine for the sticky sap), and dry it right through so no damp gets shut in.
2. Sharpen the cutting edges to the tool's own bevel: a file for shovels and hoes, a whetstone for pruners and shears.
3. Wipe a light coat of oil, WD-40, or silicone over every bit of bare metal, and rub boiled linseed oil into the wooden handles so they don't dry out and split.
4. Tighten the loose handles and pivots, then stand it all somewhere dry. A bucket of oiled sand is a tidy spot to park the digging tools.

Do it yourself, or pay someone?

Yourself. It wants a wire brush, a flat file or a stone, and an oily rag, and the extension folk file it under basic end-of-season muck. If you'd sooner hand it off, a sharpening service runs roughly $8 to $10 a hand tool, so a full kit is only a few tens of dollars.

What skipping it costs

$40 to $120 is roughly what it costs to re-kit a handful of hand tools that rusted and dulled past saving. Skip the yearly clean-and-oil and the tools go into storage damp and filthy, so rust sets in over the winter. Rust pits the metal, dulls the edges past anything a file can fix, and seizes the pivots on the pruners and loppers, which means buying new ones years before you should have. Bypass pruners run roughly $20 to $50 (a Felco about $49), a digging shovel around $35, shears around $40. A rag and ten minutes is the cheap end of that.

Signs it's overdue

• Pruners or loppers that crush and tear stems instead of slicing clean, or a blade that slides out of the cut. The edge has gone.
• An orange rust film, pitting, or stiff, squeaky pivots and hinges on the metal.
• A shovel or hoe that takes noticeably more shoving to bite into the soil than it used to.

When to start thinking about it

Give yourself about 7 days' notice. That's when Grumpty starts grumbling, so it doesn't land on you the day it's due. Mark it done and Grumpty sets the next one, every 12 months, so you can go back to forgetting it exists.

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