Picture the scene, I had just the other day received a tonne of top soil and a tonne of gravel for my new garden project the creation of a natural dye garden. I have a wheelbarrow, a rickety, never been that great, metal one. An email pops up from the nice people at Mower Magic saying 'would you like to trial/review the Bucket Barrow Urban88?'
Well I was not going to say no was I? I have not paid for the Bucket Barrow Urban88, I have not been paid to write this review. My words and opinions are my own.
The Bucket Barrow arrived quickly in a large box. I set aside some time to put it together.
The instructions are very clear and easy to follow. I have to mention the nuts and bolts sheet (it probably has a technical name). This is one of the best I have ever seen because the bolts are laid out and listed by which step they are needed for in the assembly. This made construction very easy.
The kits includes very handy bits of tape. Once I realised what the tape did I had a real 'oooh' moment. So simple, so well thought through.
and I have to mention the white dots. These were so useful. Whoever put this kit together really knew what they were doing - thank you.
It took me almost exactly one hour to put the barrow together, other people may be faster at these things but I can faff as an olympic sport. Once constructed then it was time to put the Bucket Barrow to work.
Now you may be thinking, but what is the point of the buckets? I have to confess when I first looked at them I was not totally sure either. You get four large buckets and one scoopy bucket for the front. I filled four buckets with top soil and trundled to the Dyers Garden. I picked up a bucket and emptied it into the raised bed. No more digging, no trying to manourve the barrow over the lip of the raised bed, just up, empty and done.
This made the task much faster and much easier on my back. I think I have mentioned before I have to be careful of my back after hurting it quite badly once when gardening. When doing this type of job I am very aware of being careful. The Bucket Barrow is nicely weighted so that I could keep my back straight and there was not too much effort in moving it around.
It did not take many loads before the raised bed was full. I was delighted, the Bucket Barrow had coped well and my back felt fine.
Then I moved on to a lighter job.
It was 'hair cut day' for the Prairie Borders. The ability to lift out the buckets meant I could empty them on the top of the compost heap very easily.
and I could use the buckets to put the cut grass directly into, the buckets could follow me along the border and then I popped them into the Bucket Barrow when full.
A couple of days later, I was ready to start another heavy job.
I was at the stage of putting the gravel down for the paths in the Dyers Garden. I decided I would not fill all four buckets as that might be too heavy for me to handle, so I experimented with buckets and found that three buckets was a good number. I could handle the weight and they were not too heavy to empty at the other end. Using the buckets as a load management system worked brilliantly for me.
This is not a cheap wheelbarrow, it is a premium product and has a premium price of £189 at the time of writing. I really do think it is worth it. I gave it some hard tasks and apart from being a bit dirty it looks great and handled the work extremely well. I expect to get many years from it.
