Scoop It! - A DeWit Garden Tool Review & Giveaway

My friend Shawna Coronado recently had the opportunity to attend Floriade in The Netherlands, where she was a speaker. (I'm jealous, as Floriade is an international floral exposition and only occurs once every ten years.) While she was there, she visited DeWit Garden Tools, where she collaborated with them to create a new garden tool. (Now I'm really jealous! What gardener wouldn't be?)

Photo courtesy of Shawna Coronado

DeWit Garden Tools has been making hand-forged tools since 1898 and if you've ever used one of their tools, you know what fine quality they are. Up until about a month or so ago, I only owned one DeWit tool - the 3-Tine Cultivator with a longer handle.  Cultivators like this are my favorite kind of tool to use to work up the soil during the season, between rows and between plants. I also use this one to harvest onions.

I received one of the new tools that Shawna helped design, affectionately known as "Shawna's Scoop," so that I could test it in my own garden. It came late in the year, after I was all done with most of my gardening, but yesterday we had an unusually warm January day and I put it to the test.

The potting scoop is actually designed with the container gardener in mind.  It has higher sides to help hold more potting soil in the scoop, and it's got a handy little notch on one side for slitting open the plastic bags of potting soil.  Brilliant, eh?

The overall length of the scoop is approximately 14 inches, with the scoop taking up 6 inches. There's a sharpened edge at the bottom of it, so you can slice through root balls if you need to. All this is attached to an ash hardwood handle.


I still needed to get some allium bulbs in the ground, so I decided to use the potting scoop directly in the garden. Normally, I would use a more pointy trowel to dig my holes, but with the sharpened edge on this scoop, it worked just fine, even in my too-much-clay soil. And though I wasn't using potting soil, I had to try out the bag cutter.  Like I said - brilliant.

If you've ever worked with forged tools, you know they're tough. The handles aren't going to bend when you put pressure on them.  I've got other tools that I like, but I prefer tools with wooden handles.  Wood is just so organic, holds up over time, and just plain looks good.

A giveaway!

Would you like to try one too?  DeWit sent two of them to me, so I'm going to give one away to one of my readers.  You can enter by leaving a comment to this blog post, telling me the garden tool you can't live without and why. Be sure to also let me know how I can notify you if you're chosen as the winner. 

The giveaway will end at midnight EST on Friday, January 18, 2013. At that time, I'll use Random.org to randomly choose a winner. The scoop sells for $39.90 and comes with a lifetime guarantee.

I was provided with a DeWit Potting Scoop free of charge for the purposes of testing and reviewing it on this blog. All opinions are my own. DeWit also provided one free Potting Scoop for me to give away.  The tool will be shipped to the winner at my expense.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

CONGRATULATIONS!

to

Seth Baker

The  Random.org generator picked your comment from the 30 entries (Shawna's comment was removed, since she's kind of the star of the show and was the co-inventor of the tool!).  Seth, please contact me at ourlittleacre at gmail dot com!