If you are looking for an easy way to weed your garden or allotment then you have probably looked at weed pullers. But do these nifty garden gadgets actually work, do weed pullers work? Let’s have a look and find out.
Do weed pullers work?
Yes, they do. I have used the Fiskars Xact weed puller extensively at my allotment and I love it. It has pulled up dandelions, grass and nettles with no problems at all.
- Makes pulling weeds easy
- High-quality feeling tool
- works on dandelions, nettles and grass
- Expensive
- Can take quite a bit of soil with the weed
Fiskars Xact Weed Puller
This is a tool created to pull weeds out of your lawn, soil, beds etc without needing to bend down. It does that really well actually. All the operation of the tool can be done easily from a standing position. If you are looking at getting this because you find bending over hard then rest assured that you can fully use this tool to rip weeds out of your garden without ever having to bend over.
I tested the Fiskars Xact Weed Puller on nettles, dandelions and grass, some tricky customers and it fared really well on all three. This is what we use at the allotment now if we ever spot any nettles. You can get rid of them quickly and easily without ever having to worry about getting stung.
It worked well on the dandelions and grass too, with the dandelions it managed to pull out a good chunk of the taproot and on grass, it also brought plenty of root with it. You can find the full Fiskars weed puller review here.
How does a weed puller work?
I will be talking mainly about the Fiskars weed puller here as that is the only one I have used myself but from looking at other weed pullers available online they seem to follow similar principles.
The weed puller has metal spiked ‘jaws’ on the end. On this model there are four but others have three of these jaws.
You push these serrated jaws into the ground around your identified target. Then as you push down the jaws clamp tightly against your weed. You then stand on the metal level and pull the weed out with a slight lever action.
This pulls the weed up along with a good chunk of its root. How much root you bring up depends on a few different factors and is not the same every time.
To start with positioning matters a lot, if you don’t position the jaws right above the heart of the weed then it is going to struggle to bring the full root with it.
Next up is the soil, if your soil is really compacted and heavy then again you will bring less root with you. In a nice soft soil like in my allotment beds, it brings the full root with it every time. Watering the ground before starting can help to bring more root out with each pull and can also reduce the size of the hole the tool leaves behind it.