Garden Tools

How can I store my garden tools without them getting rusty over the winter?

– Brad L, Internet

My wife likes to plant flowers in our yard and she has a good number of small gardening tools. Many of these tools quickly become dented and scratched from working the soil and if you do not take good care of them rust will set in.

What she has taken to doing is getting a few small buckets and filling them with sandbox sand. This is the white sand you would buy to fill a sandbox for your kid to play in and is sometimes called beach sand. It is important to let the sand dry out before use.

After filling a five gallon bucket without about 4 gallons of sand she takes some of my used motor oil and pours it in to make a nice sand-oil mixture. You do not want the oil to be above the sand but you do want it to mix in very well. I think about four quarts per bucket is what she uses.

What you now have is a bucket that you can stick your small tools into to give them a nice coating of oil. This oil should be good enough to protect them through the winter.

If you only have a few tools you could leave them in the sand but my wife uses the bucket to dip the tool in and out several times to give it a good coat of oil and then lets it hang over the bucket while any excess oil and sand drip off. She then hangs the tools up in the shed.

You can use a rag to wipe off the sand before hanging just be sure to leave enough oil to properly protect the metal surfaces of the tool.

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Garden Tools used under Creative Commons License from flickr user judomaster