Here are a few garden equipment maintenance tasks that are great to do during these long, slow summer days! Get it done now so you’re not so rushed at the end of the season!
It’s funny how we always think of taking care of our garden tools as kind of a spring or a fall task, because summer is actually the perfect time to get it done! We find there are quite a few days where we find that mostly the weeds are semi-under control, everything’s planted that needs to be planted for the moment, the flowers have been deadheaded and it’s too hot to water anything during the daytime. When you find yourself in a situation like that, it’s the perfect time to get a few maintenance things done so that you don’t have to worry about them later in the fall when you’re busy trying to put everything to bed for the winter or get set up for spring. Here are a few garden equipment maintenance tasks that you can check off your list during the summer!
Summer Garden Equipment Maintenance: Clean Flower Pots
Did you know that you should be cleaning your flower pots regularly? It’s a good idea to clean them thoroughly at either the beginning or the end of every season to avoid the spread of disease and help your container gardens look as healthy and beautiful as possible. Summer is a great time to kind of “clean as you go” and wash any flower pots that held spring flowers that are now empty or containers from flowers that didn’t quite thrive this season. Find a detailed explanation of how to clean your flower pots here: How to Clean Flower Pots
Sharpen and Clean Your Pruning Shears
If you haven’t been keeping up with cleaning and sharpening your pruning shears throughout the season, now’s the perfect time to do it. It only takes a few minutes and it will make a world of difference in how well your pruning shears cut. If you’ve never sharpened your pruning shears before, you’ll be amazed. 🙂 See my tips for the cleaning part of the process here: How to Clean Pruning Shears. Find a detailed tutorial for the sharpening process here: How to Sharpen Pruning Shears.
Change or Sharpen Your Lawnmower Blades
We happen to be having a really dry summer this year so the grass really isn’t growing much at all. Actually, I’ve never seen it so yellow and crispy. The good news is that we’re saving hours and hours of time each week that we would normally be spending on cutting the lawn! 🙂 If you’re in a similar situation, this is a great time to have a look at your lawn mower blades and either sharpen them, or replace them completely. You can see we needed to replace ours completely. We do a whole lot of grass cutting around here. 🙂
This is also a great time to get get to some of the other lawnmower maintenance tasks that you may have missed in the spring, like changing the oil. You can find a run-down of some of those tasks here: Spring Lawn Tractor Maintenance.
Other Summer Garden Equipment Maintenance Tasks
If you’ve gotten through all of those basic things and you’re feeling really ambitious, here are a few more ideas!
Check out your hand tools and see how they’re doing. Give them a good cleaning and oiling to prevent any rust from forming. You can also make a little self-cleaning-and-oiling tool holder like I did earlier this spring to keep your hand tools in tip-top shape!
Of course weeding is a big part of gardening life in the summer, so sharpening your hoe is a great idea. Chris keeps his really sharp and it’s amazing how quickly he can clear a row of weeds with that thing!
If you have a wheelbarrow that’s a few years old, now might be a great time to give it another coat of paint to prevent rust. You’ll also be happy in the fall if you tighten all the bolts on your wheelbarrow as well as grease the wheel a little bit to make all of that fall cleanup a little bit easier. I just had to share this photo of our rusty old wheelbarrow that we inherited from our home’s previous owners. We’ve gotten a new one since this photo was taken, but I always thought this wheelbarrow was really charming. 🙂
What other maintenance tasks do you like to get done in the summer months?
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Courtenay Hartford is the author of creeklinehouse.com, a blog based on her adventures renovating a 120-year-old farmhouse in rural Ontario, Canada. On her blog, Courtenay shares interior design tips based on her own farmhouse and her work as founder and stylist of the interior photography firm Art & Spaces. She also writes about her farmhouse garden, plant-based recipes, family travel, and homekeeping best practices. Courtenay is the author of the book The Cleaning Ninja and has been featured in numerous magazines including Country Sampler Farmhouse Style, Better Homes and Gardens, Parents Magazine, Real Simple, and Our Homes.