Fruit trees can be great for keeping you stocked with healthy, natural food. They can also be a right pain in the back (literally) when they drop fruit all over the garden for months on end!
Here, we look at one of the solutions available that is touted as making picking up fruit simple and convenient without our Gardena Combisystem Fruit Collector review.
Get a Grip
One thing that you need to know before you buy the fruit collector; It does not come with the handle. Yes, it’s one of those click-on gardening tools that requires two purchases.
The handle itself can only be bought from Gardena which, of course, ties you into their web of products for later purchases. A lot of garden tools companies do this and, actually, it works out to be a good thing – as long as you’ve at least 2 products from them.
What I mean by that is that it ends up saving a lot of space.
Performance
Once you have attached the handle, the collector unit itself is very effective. You just roll the basket along the ground and once it encounters fruit (in the case of this test, apples), in they pop.
The basket is made of a flexible kind of plastic and this allows for the fruit to squeeze into it. It really seems like a simple solution and you can probably get half a dozen medium-sized apples in there before needing to empty it.
This is done by tipping the unit on its end and letting the apples drop out.
One thing that you will have to note; The hole in the unit that allows you to empty the fruit can’t accommodate very large fruit items. But it will allow them to enter the unit.
That means with the huge apples in this case, you can pick them up into the machine but not empty them out. In that situation, you just reach into the collector unit and pull the big pieces out by hand.
Back Saviour
The human body is pretty poorly designed when it comes to bending and lifting. It’s not long before getting a sore back from picking up fruit. Especially so when you have quite a bit to pick up.
In the garden that this was tested on, there are three very productive apple trees. That means apples falling for a few good months non-stop.
I’m pleased to report that this thing works very well for saving back pain. The handle is nice and long which helps, too.
Final Thoughts on the Gardena Fruit Collector
Overall, we give the Gardena fruit collector two big thumbs up. It is such a simple idea and it works really well!
When in possession of one of these, picking up fruit from the garden goes from being a chore to being something that you might even look forward to.