Headline: It works, worked really well for me, and saved probably 90% of the labor of planting a bunch of bulbs. I know that the Auger, as an invention, is literally thousands of years old, and the Greeks were using it to draw water up wells back before the invention of democracy or whatever, but the
fact is that I went more than 40 years of my life without this technology and I sorely wish I had bought one of these sooner. To give you an idea of what I was up against, we're in the midst of a big reinvention of our backyard that involved turning a lot of grassy area into mulched beds for flowers, bushes, and trees. Because of the timing of things and man's general inclination toward laziness, instead of paying someone more than a thousand dollars to sod-cut all of the ugly, rooty, weedy excuse for a "lawn", or renting a machine and doing it myself, we just visited my friend's baby-clothes company and picked up a few hundred cardboard boxes, laid all of those down on top of the grass and buried them all in 2" - 4" of mulch to kill the grass and create...uh, "layered mulching" or something like that. And due to timing, we wanted to get that done before winter and didn't have time to mark out where we were going to plant a zillion bulbs. "We'll just dig through it all later" Past Selves said to Ourselves, kicking the can down the road to Future Selves. Well this weekend it was time to plant, and I'm not kidding when I say my wife was skeptical when I pulled these bright-orange firework-looking metal monstrosities out of their box and said, "Honey, shall we try something new this weekend?" So she dropped the bulbs down wherever she wanted them and I enlisted the help of my 11-year-old daughter. I attached these (I mostly used the medium size, but needed the large size for a few of the bigger bulbs) to my 20V battery-powered drill driver and went at it. At first, I carefully pulled the 2-4 inches of mulch away and used the auger to bore through the cardboard layer and into the wet muddy clay/dirt that we have here in Utah Valley, which is an ancient lakebed. My recommendation is to hold the drill back so you don't just drill into the ground like if you were burying an anchor pole for a dog tether or a pavilion and then trying to yank it all out. No, that's the fool's way (or maybe that will only work in loose, dry dirt). Hold back at the beginning and leg the auger do the work of digging the dirt back up for you -- this easily produced snaky muddy clods all around the hole, and left a perfectly bulb-shaped hole for my daughter to drop the bulb in, then push the dirt/mud back in. I stopped even bothering pulling the mulch back because the auger actually makes quick work of that, too. It was so easy that we did probably 50 bulbs in less than an hour, and took a 5 minute break to stretch my back out. My wife was amazed and is an absolute convert. She loved how quick it went, how effortless it was (especially for her since I gladly did all the work!), how it didn't make a fat mess of the garden and the mulch, EVERYTHING. We can even count on our teenage boys to help with more planting because it's actually FUN TO DIG HOLES. I feel like Huckleberry Finn convincing the other kids to paint the fence. Seriously. Buy these. They are very tough, though I didn't abuse them (or my drill) by yanking or pushing or twisting them side to side -- you don't need to do ANY of that. Just let the auger be an auger. It wants to make a hole for you. Let it. Technical notes: I set my drill to low speed and max torque (15 on my small DeWalt) and didn't need to apply very much pressure at all. The most work you need to do is right at the beginning of the point where the spiral starts cutting into the ground -- just hold it steady, take it slow, and let the auger pull up the dirt for you. I was going through a layer of matted dead grass in cold muddy clayish lakebed soil and it was no problem. OH AND ROCKS! The worst part about digging around here is constantly hitting rocks with your shovel deeper than about 2 inches since I live on an ancient lakebed. But this auger attachment does a great job pulling up small rocks. If you hit any bigger ones you can wiggle it up and down a bit and probably need to move your shaft over a bit or get a big shovel to move a big enough rock. But it pulls up rocks up to about golf-ball-size without much trouble at all.
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Reviewed in the United States on January 29, 2024 by Clark Woolstenhulme
