Dads Love Gadgets for the Garden

It's Father's Day at the weekend and presents for Dads, like at all other times of the year, is bound to focus on gadgetry. Dads love gadgets and hate the slog of gardening, so any new tool that can extend the amount of time spend relaxing in the garden with a cold beer is a welcome addition to the arsenal.

Go to BBC Gardener's World Show this weekend and while the girls are swooning in the sweet peas, the boys will be astride the Toros and John Deeres.

Electric gardening tools hold a special appeal. They are clean and quiet compared to their petrol-driven rivals. But they do have one extremely annoying shortcoming - the cable. It gets in the way, catches on plants and, unless you are a super-gardener with power-points cunningly hidden in your flowerbeds, it normally means you can only work a short distance from the house. So, anything cordless is a godsend.

At this is the time of year when there's always endless patches of grass that need trimming off and the lawn-edges constantly need tidying. And the weather so far has made it all much worse.

Enter the Flymo Cordless Mini-Trim 250X. New this year, it is the top of the Flymo range of hand tools that double as trimmers and edgers that they have been developing for the last few years. It has sleek, aerodynamic lines and an adjustable head so that it can either trim with blades cutting horizontally or switch to edging with blades vertical and a neat guiding roller to keep you on the straight and narrow.

Most important, it is powered by a rechargeable 12 volt battery, so you are totally unrestricted. Flymo advertise a running time of 30 minutes which is pretty good for a hard-working tool like this. It comes with a neat wall-hanging bracket that incorporates the charger so you just hook in on the garage wall and reach for what you have also been given for Father's Day with a bit of luck – a bottle of chilled something to quench the thirst.

Articles reprinted with permission from Greenfingers.com