Mulch the Whole Garden in an Afternoon With These

A shovel blade fights its way into a chip pile and lifts a half-load of the bottom inches; ten thin tines slide through and carry triple per stroke. The ensilage fork is the single biggest speed upgrade on this page - the pile that took a weekend of shovel work moves in a morning.

It also turns compost and moves leaf piles - one fork, many mountains.

The classic single-wheel barrow loaded with chips steers like a drunk unicycle and dumps sideways into the roses at the first rut. Two wheels make a full six-foot load push stable with one hand - and the same barrow then hauls the compost, the harvest, the firewood and the kid.

A garden cart beats even this on flat ground; the barrow wins in tight rows.

The quiet failure of mulched beds is the border: chips migrate into grass, grass roots into chips, and by August the line is a suggestion. Steel edging pounds in once and holds the frontier for a decade - crisp line above ground, root barrier below it, mower wheel track along it.

Steel disappears visually where plastic edging announces itself forever.

Wood chips are splinter delivery at volume, and mulching is the day the thin stretchy garden gloves die. Real leather palms shrug off the splinters and the fork handle both - and buying the three-pack acknowledges the eternal law that one glove of every pair enters the witness protection program.

Dedicate a pair to the truck, a pair to the shed - the third is already gone.

The gravel path and the driveway crack sprout a weed crop no mulch can stop, and hand-pulling gravel weeds is nobody's hobby. A propane torch wilts a path's worth in ten minutes - not by incinerating, just a second of wilt per plant - and turns the worst weeding beat into the most satisfying one.

Never on mulch or in drought - this tool is for gravel, brick and concrete.