Garden Tools 2008

2008

Dear Customer,

This year marks our 30th year in business, and our 19th year of publishing a gardening catalog separate from that of our woodworking tool line.

Despite the tremendous advances in technology over the years, there just haven’t been a lot of gardening products that lent themselves to conversion to digital readouts, attachment of lasers, or manufacturing tolerances taken to extreme limits, as has happened throughout the woodworking industry. The changes in the gardening world have been much more subtle and organic; better ergonomics, increased product longevity, and improved horticultural practices have been the order of the day. The main focus in gardening is still the activity itself, not increasing the precision of the tools used to do it.

For us, the challenge during this time has been to dig through the ever-increasing array of gardening products we face each year to ferret out a reasonable and varied selection for you. This is a much more difficult task than it seems; where there were twenty pruners to choose from 30 years ago, there are three hundred today – a problem not unique to tools. Consider something as simple as toothpaste; it doesn’t seem that long ago that there were two or three major brands, each offering two flavors, regular and mint. Today, not only does it seem impossible to buy the same product two months in a row, but the permutations of packages, flavors, and formulations seem to increase exponentially every year.

Fortunately for us, each of you has been an ally in separating the wheat from the chaff by voting with your dollars, giving us your comments, and directing our sourcing efforts. We rely on you for much of the feedback that keeps our catalog relevant. Please keep it coming!

In turn, we promise to keep the lasers at bay, and to continue to offer real choices.

Cheers,

Robin C. Lee

President