3 cheaper alternatives to expensive garden tools

There are no shortage of useful, and expensive, garden tools available today. But with a little creativity, you can repurpose old or inexpensive items to use as handy garden accessories. Here are three examples.

• Here's a low-cost alternative for gardening kneepads: use a scrap from an old closed-cell foam camping mat. This will protect your knees just as well as the fancy models in gardening catalogues
• It's tough, shock absorbing and easy to clean with soap and water
• If you or your kids don't have an old pad to cut up, check with your local Boy Scout troop or a university outdoor program. The pads get torn and are often replaced

How do you move weeds, pruned branches, rocks and the like from your garden? Hoity-toity gardening catalogues would have you believe you need to spend a small fortune on a pushcart. But, in addition to their expense, carts and wheelbarrows are heavy and unwieldy, especially on hills. They're often overkill for everyday tasks.

The solution? A flying saucer sled. Attach a rope to a handle of one of these round, steel or plastic sleds, and you'll have a sturdy sledge that pulls easily across grass and paths. If you have kids, come winter, this is one garden tool that will still find plenty of use!

• You can buy all sorts of carts and racks to wheel around the garden with your rakes and trowels. But you can skip right past that page of the gardening catalogue if you have an old golf bag on wheels
• Long tools fit neatly in the main compartment, and hand tools can be clipped to the outside. The pockets hold seeds, shears and other smaller items
• And if you discover any tees inside one of those pockets, they can be put to use too. Wooden or plastic tees make great colour-coded markers for newly seeded gardens
• You can't move the holes off a golf course, but you can borrow the idea for use at home. Take a 25-centimetre (10-inch) length of PVC pipe that's 38 millimetres (1 1/2 inches) in diameter and bury it so it stands vertically in the ground at the edge of your vegetable plot. Now you have a caddy to hold your rake, hoe or shovel at the ready: just turn the tool upside down and slide its handle into the pipe. Strategically locate these tool caddies around your yard and garden

So before you get tempted by pricey new garden gear, see if you can recreate the same thing with inexpensive items of your own.