The tip is nicely pointed, which seems to come in handy for breaking hard ground. Plus, it also comes with a small hole punched into it – this enables you to hang the drill bit when storing it away, which is pretty convenient. In terms of size, the drill bit is 22 cm long and 4 cm wide , which gives it the potential to be used for a variety of different bulbs. If, like me, you’ve wasted countless hours struggling to plant bulbs into hard ground, then this auger drill bit will be a huge game-changer – I’m surprised it took me this long to try one out!

You can then sit a bulb in the hole that you’ve just made, before holding the bulb planter over the top of it. Squeezing the handle is easily done, and sees the soil plug fall neatly out of the tool and into the hole. Firm it down and then move on to the next!

These tools are designed to make holes that are just the right and depth size for planting the most common types of bulbs, and so it takes out a lot of the guesswork. What are the best long-handled bulb planters available in the UK? If you’re planting a lot of larger bulbs, use a bulb planter hand tool that removes plugs of earth . This tool creates uniform holes, and fills them in again, in two simple steps. Look for a width of around 60 mm, and depth marking on the side – something that can be really useful when planting different types of bulb.

While this planting tool may not be quite as easy to use at first as some of the others out there, things go much smoother (and faster) once you develop a technique that suits the soil you’re using it in . Once you’ve worked this out, the tool becomes much easier to use than the others – it requires the least amount of effort and force to dig a hole , even in hard ground. As you can see, there’s not much to it. The only time the tool was difficult to use was on hard and stony ground. Even after exerting a fair amount of pressure (which you’re not meant to do), I couldn’t push the planter in deep enough. At just over 1.2kg in weight, this Draper long-handled bulb planter is quite light for a completely metal construction.

Quality-wise, it’s about what you’d expect for the price and will last as long as you take it easy and don’t try slamming it into hard soil or stamp on the foot rests too hard. I used this bulb planter to plant a variety of spring bulbs, including tulips, daffodils, anemones, and snowdrops. Some went into raised beds, others went into hard and uncultivated soil, and several went into lawn. Out of the three, this bulb planter was most effective when I was planting into raised beds and grass/lawn. It can be used on harder ground to an extent, but I found that I had to use quite a bit of force to dig down to the desired depth – I felt that doing this too often might cause the handle to break.