Kelly 
The best soil test kits for vegetable gardens fall into two very different camps. Mail-in lab kits ship your soil to a real testing facility and come back with a full nutrient panel plus fertilizer rates. At-home kits put a color chart in your hand and give you an answer in minutes, usually for less … Read more
The best tabletop propane heaters for outdoor dining are the compact radiant units built to sit in the middle of a table and warm two to four seated guests without heating the rest of the patio. We spent the season testing ten of them on our own deck, and the difference between a heater that … Read more
The best outdoor fireplaces for backyards fall into four very different families, and picking the wrong one is the single most common mistake I see people make. A fire pit is an open bowl. A chiminea is a bulbous metal body with a narrow chimney that drafts smoke upward. A portable fireplace looks like a … Read more
Yes, propane fire pits are safe on a deck when you use an ember-free gas unit with a burner held above the boards, keep it clear of the house and railing, put a fire-rated mat under it, and follow your local fire code. Propane throws no sparks, ash or falling embers, and it shuts off … Read more
Wet heavy snow breaks weak machines, and the reason is mechanical rather than marketing. Our top pick, the EGO POWER+ 21 inch cordless snow blower, pairs a variable-speed steel auger with a brushless motor that keeps feeding dense, near-freezing flakes into the housing instead of letting them bridge and stall. For snow totals above roughly … Read more
The short answer: the best cordless snow blowers for small driveways are single-stage machines with an 18 to 21 inch clearing width, a 4.0 to 5.0 Ah lithium-ion battery, and a total weight you can lift into a car without help. If your pavement runs from a townhouse parking pad to a two-car driveway, that … Read more
The best snow blowers for large gravel driveways are two-stage machines, gas or high-voltage cordless, with adjustable skid shoes, a steel auger and self-propelled drive. The skids lift the intake housing about an inch above the stones so the auger never digs into the gravel, and the wide intake plus long throw cut your pass … Read more
If you have ever watched a slab of wet snow let go near your gutter and land on the walkway, you already know the argument for owning a snow roof rake. The best roof rakes for snow removal let you pull that load off the roof while both feet stay on the ground, which is … Read more
Shoveling a two-car driveway in January is a bad morning. You wake up before dawn, the snow has already refrozen into the concrete, and the whole job takes an hour before you even get to work. A heated driveway mat removes that step entirely by warming a strip of pavement on its own so falling … Read more
Yes, electric snow shovels work well on a sidewalk, with one caveat: they are built for a few inches of snow on pavement, not for a storm dump or a drift. That is the whole value proposition in one sentence, and it is the reason these tools sell to people who own a walkway, a … Read more