Anchorage Daily News

You need only peruse the selection of weeding tools at Alaska Mill & Feed to realize that gardeners are obsessed with reinventing the wheel.

There are the no-need-to-squat dandelion destroyers like Grampa's Weeder ("Since 1913"), the Hound Dog Weed Hound (instructions in French!) and the wildly popular Fiskars UpRoot.

There's the Garden Bandit, a loop that works wonders on chickweed ("Used by early settlers"), the Angle Weeder (with a model made specifically for left-handers) and the ergonomically friendly Radius NRG Weeder.

There are so many choices, your dandelions are apt go to seed in the time it takes to browse the shelves. You can spend anywhere from $2.19, for a no-frills, no-fulcrum Bond Weeder, to $36.95, for the hardly-any-effort UpRoot.

Or you can listen to the man who dispensed this advice with a growl after looking at the vast array of tools:

"That big screwdriver you've got will do the same thing -- and save you money."

Yes, but does it have a neon-green handle like the Radius NRG?

This summer, the gardener's quest to buy a better mousetrap -- whether the desired object is a weeder, a trowel or a rake -- is a challenge. For all the variations of weeders and other gardening gadgets out there, no new wonder tool has emerged this year to change the way our gardens grow.

"The UpRoot is the newest rage," said Kelly Fuller of Alaska Mill & Feed -- but even it isn't new. It's been around for at least three summers.

So in lieu of something new, Anchorage gardeners are in the market for something blue. And yellow. And purple.

"The 'new' stuff this year is color," said Adam Craig, a lawn specialist at True Value Hardware. "The tomato cages are really bright colors, and the pots. The lawn furniture is all bright and retro.

"Everything is brightly colored. It's an eye catcher, I guess. It gives your yard a unique factor. It makes people feel like they have something different."

Linda Rambur of Bell's Nursery has noticed the same thing.

Garden gnomes are popular this summer, she said, and so are rain chains. But the biggest trend is injecting color into a lawn or garden.

"People are just wanting a lot of color," Rambur said, and they're willing to pay for it. Tomato cages that come in bright colors cost more than standard metal-colored ones, she said, partly because the color coating makes them rustproof.

Among the more popular items at Alaska Mill & Feed, Fuller said, are TubTrugs -- lightweight, bendable baskets whose flexibility makes it easy to sweep things into them or pour things out of them. And like so many things this summer, they are as colorful as a flower box, coming in pink, orange, blue, purple and all kinds of other colors.

Even the standard green garden hose faces competition from the rest of the color wheel.

"There's bright red hoses, yellow hoses, purple hoses," Craig said.

The garden-variety hoses most of us know are made from green vinyl. The brightly colored ones are made from rubber, said Craig, which is a good choice in Alaska, because rubber is more flexible than vinyl in cold temperatures.

But people aren't opting for purple garden hoses because they're more suitable to the climate, he said. They're buying them for the splash of color.

"I sell a basic black rubber hose for half the price (of a colored one)," Craig said.

A 50-foot colored hose sells for $59.99 at True Value, he said. A 50-foot black one goes for $35.99.

"They buy for the color, not the rubber," he said.

Steph Daniels, one of Bell's gardening gurus, said lime-green nozzles are all sold out at the Specking Road store. So are some of the store's other rainbow-inspired tools and gadgets.

But like the man at Alaska Mill & Feed who recommended a screwdriver over a $36 weeder, Daniels is a low-frills gardener.

She said a gardener's only necessary tools are a shovel, a hoe and a rake -- "Though you can do with just a shovel and rake, because you can use the shovel to drag things and chop things up," she said.

No weeder on the list? "I use my hands," she said.

No spade? "I couldn't find one yesterday," she said, "so I used my hands."

Pressed to name one trend or one must-have gadget this summer, Daniels needed only a moment to produce an answer.

"Landscaping companies," she said. "They are booming. I see them here all the time, and they're saying more and more people are hiring someone else to do the work.

"That's the big new accessory: Paid help."

Find Beth Bragg online at adn.com/contact/bbragg or call 257-4309.

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