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

You only need three things to keep your equipment sparkling.

Gardening Tools
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Photo by Cathy Scola/Getty

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.

What You Need

  • A 5-gallon bucket
  • 5 gallons of sand
  • ¾ quart of motor oil

How To Use The Sand And Oil Method 

  1. Fill your bucket up with sand and pour motor oil on top.
  2. Use a hand trowel or small tool to mix the sand and oil.
  3. Continuously plunge your dirty tool in and out until clean.
  4. Tap your tool against the bucket and brush it off to remove leftover sand.

How It Works

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 metal, preventing rusting, Hentges says. Multiple types of oil may have this effect, but Hentges recommends sticking to motor oil rather than vegetable oil because the edible kind will rot. Plus, she says, it’s an excellent opportunity to recycle oil drained from your mower. 

Your bucket of sand and oil isn't only good for a single use. It can clean tools over and over again to keep them in pristine condition. Keep a filled bucket near where you store your gardening equipment for future use. You can also keep tools in the bucket with their handle out for clean, sharp, and readily-available equipment. 

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