Lost Gardening Tools...
Time I did an inventory of all the gardening hand tools I've lost this year - secateurs, diggers, scrapers, breadknives, kitchen scissors, steak knives... The list goes on and on.
All These Lost Tools Found!
It's difficult to be accurate, because some tools are lost for months and then found again buried in the garden, or mixed up in a pile of weeds. Or they've been popped in some random bucket in a random location and forgotten about.
My Expensive Secateurs
In the ash heap...
Some, alas, turn up at the bottom of the bonfire ash heap. I've found forlorn metal ends of gardening forks and diggers, blackened skeletons of scissors, once even the cutting part of an expensive saw. Oops. They get mixed up with the burnable mess in my wheelbarrow, and get tipped on the fire.
Buy expensive?
Sometimes I deliberately buy expensive hand tools. The theory is that I will obviously take more care of them if big money has changed hands. This doesn't always work. I'm obviously not very good with money, either!
Then the cheaper secateurs I buy can come to pieces - more specifically the spring which makes them work properly bounces off somewhere, impossible to find. And hopeless then to use efficiently.
My Tool Bag
I've tried carrying my tools around in a tool bag, stashing them safe inside after a gardening session. This works really well for a couple of weeks, but its easy to get out of the habit. And once I lost the whole bag! Aargh! Found it hanging in the Leyland hedge. Out of sight, out of mind...
Left my tools outside again...
My worst habit is to leave hand tools in the lawn. They can quickly become covered in grass and rendered invisible, then 'found' weeks later by the ride-on lawn mower. There's an awful noise and the shear pins break, resulting in a lot of mending and muttering from Non-Gardening Partner. Oops again.
Just don't lose anything!
Hmm... The solution is easy. Just don't lose anything. Keep track of things, put everything away when not in use. Easy to say, not so easy to implement!