Category Archives: Garden tools

Readers of this blog have an interest in gardening and that of course means that there is an interest in garden tools that will make your work in the garden easier and more enjoyable. 3 years ago I came across what I thought was a fantastic product called the Dramm Rain Wand at a display at my favorite nursery Berkeley Horticultural.

These wands were 30″ long offered the ability to water at the base of plants with minimal effort for the gardener and they came in a rainbow of really nice colors. I bought one for $30 and loved it…until micro-holes appeared along the 1/3 section of the wand closest to the water nozzle. Since I’ve never dragged the wand on the ground, I had to conclude that the holes were the result of the metal wand touching some rose thorns when I watered. I used silicon sealant to repair the leak and things were looking good until the handle of the wand started to leak and I couldn’t find any way to repair what was obviously a manufacturing problem.

I kept the wand around for the rest of the season looking wistfully at it and wishing I could figure out a way to repair it since it cost me $30. It finally made its way to the landfill when my wife protested that I was keeping a useless piece of trash that was cluttering up the garden.

The next year, I decided to give Dramm the benefit of the doubt and bought a new yellow wand (at this point my investment in Dramm added up to $60). The wand worked like a dream and then my wife asked me to buy one for the hose on her side of the garden. I hesitated buying another $30 wand, so I went to OSH and got her a 30″ wand, manufactured in China. It wasn’t a pretty color like the Dramm and she thought I was getting the good stuff for me and being frugal over what I bought for her (a bad position for me to be in ). So, I returned the Chinese-made wand and bought my wife a pretty red Dramm wand (which increased my Dramm investment to $90).

Before the end of the summer (2010), both Dramm wands had failed. My yellow one was once again leaking from the handle onto my shoes and the red one would no longer close off the flow of water.

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I bought Dramm because of the design, the color choices, and because it is an American-made product. Supporting American-made products is important to me because that creates jobs! Unfortunately my economic patriotism cost me a total of $90 over three purchases and all I have to show for it are faulty watering wands. Judging by my experience with faulty Dramm products, I’d have to compare Dramm product quality to 1970′s era Detroit manufactured automobiles that gave us no-quality products including the explosively popular (pun intended) Ford Pinto and the Chevy Vega.

All joking aside, Dramm Corporation has serious manufacturing quality issues that cause its products to reliably fail. If you are looking for a watering wand and don’t want to be bent over a barrel to purchase an expensive and faulty product, save yourself the headache and (God I hate to say this), go to the hardware store and buy yourself a Chinese-made wand at less than 50% the cost of a Dramm. At least if the Chinese-made wand has a manufacturing problem it won’t harm your gardening budget as much as a Dramm will.

I hand water my entire garden and I need wands that will work now that summer is here. So, I’ve notified Dramm of my displeasure and I’m ready to vote with my wallet by laying down some American greenbacks to buy two Chinese-made watering wands at OSH. Unfortunately due to Dramm’s lack of product quality and the lack of other American-made products in the stores, I’ll also contribute to the trade deficit we have with China. My act of protest won’t single-handedly contribute to the loss of American jobs, but if Dramm continues down the path of poor product quality, it most certainly will play a part in lost American jobs.