“What is your Go-To gardening tool?”

“What is your Go-To gardening tool?”

That is the question we posed to horticulture professionals and lifelong gardeners across the country. The answers may surprise you. Each gardener cited a different favorite. While some were very loyal to a specific brand, most simply choose the brand most readily available. Some owned a half dozen brands and some were clueless on brand but positively devoted to the tool.

For this series, a “Go-To tool” is defined as a tool used almost daily or one that the gardener simply couldn’t be without, even if used occasionally. In this series, each article will feature one gardener and their favorite GO-TO tool.

The Hooked Bill Pocket Knife - Jenks Farmer, South Carolina Plantsman www.JenksFarmer.com

If you are unfamiliar with the name or haven’t read one his delicious stories about gardening wisdom, chances are that you or your local botanical garden grow at least one of his beautiful blooming lilies. Jenks and his company, Jenks Farmer, Plantsman, have been curating large bulb specimens for decades. While Crinum lilies are his specialty, his 18th century farm also cultivates pineapple lilies, blood lilies, spider lilies, along with other rare collections and old time favorites.

Jenks’ favorite Go-To gardening tool? The Hook Bill Pocket Knife.

This tool is so widely favored and used by Jenks and his staff that he sells them on his website alongside his books, bulbs and other wares. As Jenks is known to do, he told me why through story.

I carry comfort in my pocket, but it’s older than cell phones and its connection crosses time and ether. Like so many things on this farm, my pocket knife, connects me to Daddy. Sometimes knives cut, sometimes they bind.

It’s not my father’s knife per se. I might loose that. My knife is different anyway; mine is a gardener’s hook billed knife. If I’m wearing pants, I”m carrying my pocket knife, my most important gardening tool. On this hot June morning, I kept a little list of each time I reached for that knife.

• Root pruning pineapple lily bulbs
• Top pruning a Gomphrena that was looking a bit wild
• Scraping the bark off a browning peach tree to check for life
• Slicing up cardboard for the compost pile
• Making an invisible, healable slit in an ear of corn to see when I could eat it
• Opening up a plastic seal on a jug of Humic acid

I did all of this before loaning it to Momma, so she could cut zinnias for the back porch table. Not everyone may want a constant connection to their father. Take it the other way then. Create your own connection. I’ve found that giving one of these knives to a young gardener feels important, symbolic even, especially when you watch them ripping open the package, knowing that never again, will they have to make such a ragged tear.

That little weight in someone's pocket, that sleek bump, might just bind them to you for a lifetime.

While Jenks says the steel blade stays sharp a “good long time”, it can be sharpened with a kitchen knife sharpener or a sharpening stone. At his nursery, they often use a grinder for quicker results. “Besides,” he said, who doesn’t love a grinder!”

There are dozens of varieties of this tool and Jenks has tried (and lost) several. By far, his favorite is the wooden handled style available on his website. As he says, “it just feels right in your hand and in your pocket.”

To order one from his website, visit: https://jenksfarmer.com