What Your Garden Needs Is an Electric Drill

The internet is going crazy about using your drill in the garden . In short, you insert a very long drill and make holes into which you insert light bulbs. But it gets even better: drills are made specifically for this – they are called augers – and they are even better than ordinary drills , and you can do much more with them.

How to use a drill to plant bulbs

The bulbs should be planted 4-6 inches deep, close together. The shovel isn’t perfect because it has too much footprint, but the drill will actually create many holes close together at the right depth. The augers come in a variety of lengths and widths, and the 3-inch auger holds all the bulbs you need to plant. You simply attach the auger to your drill, point it at the ground and start drilling. (You could use a corded drill, but a cordless drill is a huge advantage in this case.) The auger design cuts through the ground much more easily than a drill bit, loosening the surrounding soil, which benefits your bulb or plant roots. You will have a deep cylindrical hole into which you will drop the light bulb.

When to use an electric drill to loosen the soil

Now is the perfect time to freshen up your soil because it still holds all the moisture from the spring rain. By the summer it will dry out, and it will become much more difficult to work. The auger is ideal for freshening up the topsoil, especially around plants where a shovel can be a much greater threat.

The real draw here are the planters and hanging baskets, which need to be updated every year, as opposed to garden beds, which benefit from not disturbing the soil. These small containers need new compost, new fertilizer, and tend to get very compacted over the summer, so you have to break it all up, and an auger is a much easier way to do that than dump it all out.

However, the best way is with a long auger that can go under your sidewalk or driveway to dig a trench for pipes or wire. If you have ever had to do this, you know that it is very expensive to do it professionally and it is difficult to do it yourself. You can use the hose connector provided for this, but if you meet anything under the pavement, the water is useless. However, the auger went like clockwork, clearing the way in a few minutes.

Also, if you’re installing lantern, fence, or gazebo posts, you can use an auger instead of a post hole digger. Digging a lot of narrow and deep holes is not difficult. This means less cement is needed to fill the hole, which is important if you need to carry that cement from the machine to the job site.