Sneeboer planting trowel heart shape

The shape of this hand tool has been around for 100 years - at least that's how our supplier sees it. The Sneeboers must know, after all, their tool forge has been based in the municipality of Enkhuizen on the west bank of the IJsselmeer for at least as long. In their range, the gardening tool with the traditional heart-shaped blade is logically named "old Dutch". A heart for tulips, daffodils and all other flower bulbs: every year, the gardeners at Keukenhof - the famous garden complex south of Amsterdam - prove anew that the planting trowel with its sharpened edges on both sides makes planting flower bulbs easier when they dig millions of planting holes and arrange their bulbs into large and small works of art. Hand-forged from stainless steel, the wide blade is extremely durable and can also be used to break up, turn and loosen the soil in the bed, for example to prepare planting sites for seedlings and young plants in quick succession. The significantly longer than usual handle, made of smoothly sanded ash wood that swings with the blade, allows for powerful gripping.

For more than 100 years, the family of the West Frisian blacksmith Jaap Sneeboer has been supplying their Dutch fellow citizens, known to be incessantly engaged in farming, dyking and horticulture, with the tools they need to do so. At Sneeboer, they use two different types of stainless steel for their traditional Frisian horticultural tools: a tougher one (with higher degrees of alloying) for the springs and grommets holding the handle and low-alloy steel that responds better to forging for the functional parts in the narrow sense. They weld the individual construction elements together, then ground and polish them by hand.

It has long become common practice to stamp and roll garden tools. However, we hardly need to describe the difference; we want to point out that forging is the only way to deal with a tool in all its details and strengthen the material in those parts where this is necessary for functional reasons.