Best builders’ wheelbarrow: Walsall Wheelbarrows 85ltr galvanized– this can take a real battering and do hard work.

If you’ve never used a wheelbarrow before, don’t worry as there isn’t a lot to it. Having said that, there are a couple of little things to remember that might make your first time with one of these tools go a bit smoother, and might even prevent an injury. Whenever products are this low-budget you have to expect a few quality issues, and this is no different with this wheelbarrow. For a start, the metal tub does dent easily, so it won’t be looking brand new for very long. Having said that, apart from looking a bit ugly it didn’t seem to affect the usage of the barrow, and I have old barrows that don’t look great but are still used to this day: When deciding on a wheelbarrow for purely garden use, you have to consider more than just something you can fill up with soil or throw your gloves and tools into. As any experienced gardener knows, there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye – I reviewed this years ago and it still deserves it’s spot as best overall wheelbarrow for gardening. Here’s why: The tyres on Walsall’s wheelbarrow are the puncture-proof kind, but they are not the usual hard plastic material. Instead, they feel like some kind of hard rubberised material, and I have to say that it does make the barrow feel better to move over lumpy terrain than a lot of other products. On the plus side, single-wheeled barrows are very manoeuvrable when compared to versions with more wheels, and as long as you are careful, and don’t’ try to break your fastest lap of the garden with a big pile of material loaded in the barrow, you should be ok.Best wheelbarrows for seniors: Draper expert garden caddy– lovely and light weight with a large base incase you have a slip! A great option for people looking for an affordable wheelbarrow to use in their garden, but that can handle the odd heavy-duty task, is this one from DJM. Sporting a sturdy steel frame and metal tub, it is both durable and able to handle heavier loads.

Well Simon, I want to mix large quantities of cement, and to do this I need a wheelbarrow that has enough depth to hold it. On top of that, it needs to be wide enough so that I can mix the cement with a shovel without banging into the sides every 5 seconds. But that’s not all. The wheelbarrow needs to be low enough off the floor so that I’m not having to lift the powdered concrete up too high to get it in there. Oh, and it has to be strong enough to hold the weight and be durable enough material so as to not get chipped and scratched by the shovel as I mix.” There were also some issues with bolts and holes lining up, but with a bit of help we got it assembled in the end. On the plus side, the pneumatic tyres are really good quality for the price, and I think that those, and the other pros we mentioned, outweigh the cons. Pros Life saver, can get everything and more in this, meaning only one trip to the feild, one very happy pony owner Now, I have to admit that making sharp turns with this barrow isn’t as easy as with single wheeled models like the Walsall, DJM, Crazy Gadget, and Draper wheelbarrows, but I have to say that Oypla have done a decent job at making this pretty agile. After giving it a lot of thought, I figured that I’d choose something that was big enough to handle medium sized loads, but not so big that it wouldn’t fit in the greenhouse. Then I thought about people whose greenhouses or sheds are already full, and that would mean leaving the wheelbarrow outside, so being weather resistant was another factor.I guess I’d say that if your garden or work area is relatively easy to traverse, or if you are pretty fit and don’t mind using a bit of extra effort to move the wheelbarrow, then puncture-proof tyres could save you a potential headache. For those of you who might be a little longer in the tooth, or just have lumpy gardens to work on, the smoothness of pneumatic wheels can’t be beat.

The thing to think about when it comes to choosing how large a maximum load weight you want, is can you actually lift that much without hurting yourself? I mean, it’s fine to be pushing a fully loaded 90kg wheelbarrow if you’re particularly fit, but not everyone is, and if you’re only going to be filling it half way, you might as well save some money and buy a smaller barrow instead. Metal or plastic wheelbarrow? The downside to pneumatic tyres is obvious, and if you’ve ever owned a bicycle, motorcycle, car, etc. you will have dealt with them- punctures. With rubber and plastic tyres, you don’t have to worry about accidentally rolling over a screw, nail, or bit of glass, and then having to break out the puncture kit before you can carry on working: Pneumatic tyre is very comfortable to use until a puncture upsets things

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They’ve also done a decent job with making this wheelbarrow easy to tip, something that many two-wheeled models struggle with. I think the ease of tipping is to do with the angle of the tub in relation to the handles, and while this will be perfectly fine for most people, if you are very tall, you might find that the front-end tips forward too much as you lift the handles higher, and this will limit how much you can shift without spillage. The only real thing that was annoying about this wheelbarrow was that the instructions didn’t explain the assembly process properly, and some of the nuts were a bit fiddly to tighten up properly. It wasn’t anything life-ending, just a bit of a pain in the you-know-what. All being said, this is a very good two-wheeled wheelbarrow and definitely worth a look. Pros There are a few ways of looking at size though. Firstly, there are the actual dimensions of the wheelbarrow- height, width, etc. and these are obviously very important when you think about storage space in the garage, getting the barrow in and out of the shed door and through gates, and just generally manoeuvring it around. Trying to deftly move a huge wheelbarrow around a very small and narrow garden isn’t going to be fun, so you might want something smaller like the Crazy gadget model. Again, whether you should buy a plastic or metal wheelbarrow will come down to your own personal needs. For shifting heavy loads, you are better off with a metal model as they tend to be much stronger and more durable than their plastic counterparts, but they are usually more expensive (the good ones anyway). There’s also the issue with rust and corrosion, and although this problem can be contained a bit by getting a galvanised barrow like the one we featured from Walsall Wheelbarrows, it will eventually get scratched off with regular use.

Wheelbarrows can obviously be used to transport materials over short distances. This can be sand, cement, compost, soil, mulch, gravel, paving stones, and just about anything else as long as the wheelbarrow, and yourself, are strong enough to haul it. Then there is the capacity of the wheelbarrow. This is often shown in litres, such as 75 litres, or 85 litres as in the case of the Draper 85L metal barrow. It could also be shown in a maximum weight load in either kilograms or pounds, and is sometimes shown in both litres and maximum weight. The maximum weight advertised isn’t always accurate though, so take it with a pinch of salt. The one in this photo was advertised as being able to hold over 160kg, but when we tested it, we thought different: Wheelbarrow suggests it can handle 160kg but from testing I would strongly disagree!!! I know it’s a hard thing to accept, especially if you have been active for most of your life, but we all need to make things easier for ourselves as we get older, and the Draper Expert Garden Caddy is an ideal product for reducing some of the strain that comes with gardening.You only have to take one look at that plastic wheelbarrow to realise, yeah, it’s got support braces, but no, I am not loading that twice the weight of a heavy duty wheelbarrow! The shorter handles might also have had a part to play in that too. Don’t get me wrong, they aren’t terrible, it’s just that after playing around with the Oypla that had really large handles, these seemed a bit small in comparison. Choosing a wheelbarrow that I would recommend for allotments wasn’t an easy task. You see, there are just so many variables that come into it. Different people grow different things, and perform different tasks on their allotments, so choosing a ‘one-size-fits-all’ model was pretty much impossible.