My Dad Is Completely Obsessed With This $60 Garden Tool (It’s on Sale!)
If you’re a person who struggles to find the perfect gift for your dad on birthdays and holidays like Father’s Day — which I very much am — I might have just the find for you. While my dad enjoys the occasional fancy consumable gift, like special gin or bespoke pickles, he most often requests extremely practical items that he needs to complete whatever project or chore he’s in the middle of.
Does this sound familiar to you? If so, behold my dad’s favorite garden tool that might just be the right gift for your dad, too: the Fiskars PowerLever 14-foot tree pruner with a 15-inch saw blade. Regrettably, I was not the one to buy him this tool! But since he got it last year, he can’t stop raving about it.
What makes this tree pruner so special is that it actually features two ways to cut tree limbs. The first (and most obvious) is the saw, which is a 15-inch steel blade with a slightly curved shape. Placed at the end of a 7-foot-long pole, the toothed saw blade makes it easy to reach branches that are high up, in tight spaces you can’t squeeze into, or surrounded by other branches you actually do want to keep. Oh, and if 7 feet isn’t quite enough, you can securely extend this pole to 14 feet.
The part that most delighted me, though, was the pruner that’s built into the pole. For branches up to 1 1/8 inches thick, use the hook under the saw blade to grab them, then pull the long string to lever them closed. It’s about as difficult as pulling the chain of a lamp (which is to say, not very).
How do I know all this firsthand? Well, last summer when I was lamenting the death of a couple of small trees in the front of my house, my dad offered to drive two hours to prune away the dead branches himself using his Fiskars tree pruner. When he arrived, he delighted in showing me how it worked — then once the dead trees were snipped and piled into his truck, he wandered my yard looking for more dead branches to cut. The branch hanging over my roof? Gone. The one dipping into our yard from the neighbor’s? Sliced. The one hanging above our patio? Poof. For anything too thick for the pruner, it didn’t take more than a minute to dispose of it with the saw.
I took over during part of the chore just so I could see for myself what was so great about this saw, and I have to say: I get his hype. The tool was lighter weight than I expected, and any of my arm wobbles were minimal (even at the 14-foot extension). The saw cut easily, the string-operated pruner cut smoothly, and the whole thing was a snap to store away once we were done.
It was only after this experience that I found out my father-in-law has the same exact pruner and had also been looking for excuses to use it.
A tool with a two-out-of-two-dads approval rating? Hard to beat. And right now, it’s on sale for $10 off the listing price at Home Depot — just in time for last-minute Father’s Day shopping! If only I could justify buying another for my own dad. It’s back to the drawing board for me, but hopefully this idea helps you!