Cheap plastic garden tools

Yes, I’m at it again. On Tuesday I began working in the garden. We already had a couple of garden beds, perhaps about 380 square feet, and I built a third alongside the garage and filled it with topsoil. The first time I’ve ever gardened in my life, being raised in the city. So on my first day of gardening I broke the handle on a pitchfork, and also broke a large rake. Now the rake was all plastic with a long wooden handle, and I guess that I had put a little too much pressure on it and the whole thing snapped off just above the tines. It was a cheap rake, and I guess that Mom got a few good years out of it before I came home, so she didn’t complain too much. Probably because she favors a couple of smaller rakes that we have anyway. Yet I can’t understand why companies make, and people buy, cheap plastic junk – and especially in an age when the liberals are forever whining and trying to convince us to use less oil.

The pitchfork is another story. My old man bought it a few years ago, but it looks like it has hardly been used. It is a standard steel pitchfork with a heavy wooden shaft, and those parts look like I could not break them if I wanted to. But to top that off, the manufacturer attached a cheap plastic handle to the shaft with a couple of rivets. Without the handle, the shaft is only about three-fourths of the necessary minimum length. When I began using the pitchfork to turn up some weeds, the second time I stuck it into the ground, the handle snapped off! Why would anyone make a good, heavy pitchfork with such a cheap plastic handle? And none of the big box stores sell replacement handles. So I tossed the pitchfork aside thinking that I may be able to replace the entire shaft with a full-length one on some rainy day, and Mom and I went shopping for new tools.

First we looked at rakes. A replacement rake like the one that we had was priced at as little as 8 dollars, with another for around 12. I saw a steel rake with a sturdy wooden handle that was just about as large for 18 dollars. We bought the steel rake. I am confident that it will last for 20 or 30 years, or about the lifetimes of ten of those plastic rakes! Pitchforks, however, were a different story. Lowe’s, Walmart, Tractor Supply, Curtis Lumber, we could not find a garden pitchfork unless it had a plastic handle! Then I got the idea to drive to Oxford, nearly half an hour away, to check out a Mom & Pop hardware store there. When we got there, we found a pitchfork with a sturdy wood-and-steel handle for 25 bucks. That sounded like a lot, but we bought it without hesitation. The plastic-handled pitchforks were close to $20 anyway. When I got it home, I looked at the label on the shaft, and it said “Made in Mexico”. I usually bristle at buying anything not made here, but I figured that in this case, at least the Mexicans have enough experience gardening to want a pitchfork with a real handle. I already used the pitchfork to root up all of the dandelions and weeds which covered a small garden bed, and it worked wonderfully. I figure that this pitchfork will last 30 to 50 years, or about the lives of ten of those plastic-handled pitchforks!

So while I broke the first two plastic garden tools I used, and spent $43 replacing them with wood-and-steel tools, I figure that we saved as much as $300 in today’s money for tools over the next 30 years by spending a few extra bucks now. If Americans refused to buy cheap plastic tools destined to break in a short time, then manufacturers wouldn’t make them! On the other hand, it really seems that they enjoy getting shafted, and figure it won’t hurt so bad with a cheap plastic handle.