Good afternoon
I decided to share a little trick on how to avoid losing your tools while gardening.
It often happens that when you're loosening a garden bed or pruning trees with pruning shears, you get distracted for a second, and then spend a long time searching for your tool. It seems like the pruning shears or sickle were just there, but now it's gone.
There were also some finds that were discovered only during the following gardening season.
For some reason, many manufacturers—either to reduce the cost of the product or specifically hoping that if a user loses a handy tool, they'll come back and buy a second one, thereby increasing sales—very often paint garden tools green, gray, or other muted colors that blend easily with the soil or grass.
Here's an example: some of the tools were originally designed with brightly colored elements, while others were easy to lose:
The advice is very simple: clearly mark the tools. You can do this with paint, spray paint, or regular paint from a hardware store.
To avoid spending money specifically for this purpose, I used paint that was left over from a renovation. The bright red color shows up perfectly on both the ground and the grass.
For example, here are tools with unpainted handles:
And here they are, finished with paint:
An additional advantage is that such cuttings are protected from moisture and will last longer.
If you don't have the right paint or don't want to mess around with it and wait for it to dry, there's a second option: wrap the handles with bright or contrasting duct tape.
It will look like this:
On loose soil:
In the grass:
Here, the scissors are completely hidden:
You can take this idea even further by painting the handles. Group tools with different purposes in different colors. For example, make all the shovels red, rakes and pitchforks yellow, hoes and pruning shears orange, and so on.