Spork 2 — For the garden

Sure, everyone's familiar with the spoon/fork mashup in the dining space but Robert Todd, "an eccentric English inventor and post box restorer," has combined a border spade and garden fork in an effort to bring the "one-tool/many uses" ethos to the shrub arena.

Here's Jane Owen's story from the February 23, 2008 Financial Times about how the jumbo iteration came to be.

Garden Gear: Spork

Sporks provoke reaction. The type associated with Taco Bell inspired the ‘Sporks Are Godlike’ website. The type designed for gardens divides gardeners into sceptics and enthusiasts.

The garden Spork [above and below] is roughly the same size as a border spade but the boron steel head is a combination of fork and spade. This means it is lighter than a spade and cannot suffer from bent tines. The almost-divine combination of two-in-one negates the need to swap from spade to fork and back while sorting out a border, splitting perennials or doing some deep-soil weeding.

Using it over the past few weekends my faithful border spade and fork have stayed in the shed. The zig-zag-shaped Spork head slices into the ground with ease, pulls and then shakes the earth from weeds smoothly and prevents newly-divided plants from falling as they move to their new planting places (I’ve never liked piecing root balls with a fork in order to carry them).

The Spork was invented in the 1990s by Robert Todd an eccentric English inventor and post box restorer. His enthusiasm for the Spork cost him his house but his perseverance paid off when Dutch manufacturer DeWit added the Spork to its range.

The eccentric credentials of this tool were confirmed when it received a Golden Shed Award from garden tool site Fredshed as well as a more mainstream ‘Millennium products’ award from the UK’s Design Council.

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£50.