Give your garden tools a refresh

Sharpen spades and secateurs

It’s time to get digging in order to plant trees, shrubs and roses. The effort required to do spade work is reduced enormously if the spade has a keen edge. Tasks that might have previously seemed too heavy can be done with ease if your tools are in good condition.

Clamp the spade in a vice to hold it steady while you run a file over the edge of the blade. Sharpening with a file removes some metal, but makes a very sharp edge.

Clean and sharpen your secateurs too. Sticky sap gums up secateurs making them hard to use and may potentially transmit disease from plant to plant.

Some secateurs can be taken apart for cleaning and sharpening. Lay out the pieces in order so it’s easier to put them back together. (Taking pictures of each stage of disassembly is helpful too.) Give them a wash in warm soapy water. You might need a solvent to remove hardened sap – try meths or isopropyl alcohol.

A diamond file is small enough to fit between the blades for a quick touch up without taking the secateurs apart. Use a whetstone for really blunt blades. Oil the surface and sharpen only the bevelled edges of the blades. Lay the bevelled edge flat against the whetstone and pull it towards you repeatedly until the surface is shiny and the edge is sharp.

A tree for all seasons

Cercis canadensis ‘‘Forest Pansy’’ is a small tree with an abundance of good points, not least that it looks fabulous all four seasons: pretty pink flowers on bare stems in spring; 12cm heartshaped leaves, which are a dramatic deep red-purple in summer; the most glorious shades of orange, bronze and purple in autumn; and not least, a multi-stemmed tree with beguiling lightness in its leafless form, to be admired in winter.

Don’t be alarmed by descriptions that have it growing up to 13 metres; that’s in the wild. In gardens, it seldom exceeds three metres, and is often described as a shrub. Both cold and heat hardy, it is not difficult to grow given welldrained soil, but to flower well, it likes a cosy hot spot, sheltered from cold winds and with plenty of sun.

Pop in a few Jerusalem artichokes

To start a crop, just save a few tubers from your local farmers’ market or fruit store.

Ideally give them an isolated bed to control their colonising habits, but they have cheerful yellow, sunflower-like flowers so plant them where you can enjoy their summer blooms. They shoot upwards to two metres tall by midsummer, so place them at the back of the vege garden or as a seasonal screen along a boundary fence.

These nutty edible roots appreciate full sun, but cope with partial shade, and relatively poor soil. They are easy to grow and in fact they grow so vigorously that you can use them, like potatoes or ‘‘daikon’’ radishes, to break up heavy compacted soil.