The Sand And Oil Method Is An Old-School Trick That'll Keep Your Garden Tools Clean

After a satisfying afternoon hard at work in the garden, you peel off your work gloves, brush yourself off, and give your hands a good wash to get rid of the stubborn dirt that managed to slip through. You and your green thumb are clean, but the garden tools that did all the dirty work are still too caked in soil to be allowed in the house. Don’t just throw them into storage dirty. Using dirty equipment next time you need them can lead to the spread of plant diseases.

Luckily, there’s a tried and true (and easy!) trick to wiping your gardening equipments’ slates clean. Give the Sand And Oil Method a go, recommends Casey Hentges, the host of Oklahoma Gardening. This quick and easy approach will keep your hand trowels and shovels shining between every trip to work in the garden.

Casey Hentges is the host of Oklahoma Gardening, an informational show about lawn care and landscape maintenance. Watch her segment about the Sand And Oil Method here.

As you use that initial tool just to stir up your sand and oil mixture, Hentges points out that you’ll notice that it will come out cleaner than when you started. This is the magic of this method. The coarse sand scrapes away at dirt particles on the tool with the added bonus of sharpening the edges. The sand can then be wiped off much more easily than stuck-on soil. While the sand cleans and sharpens, the oil protects the