View CartAbout Red Pig Garden Tools
Thanks for visiting our online store.
We are the only blacksmith in the United States specializing in hand forged garden tools for home gardeners, nurserymen, landscapers, and farmers.
We've been producing hand-forged implements for over 15 years. Bob is a tool designer, inventor, and frequent writer on various gardening topics and Rita is your contact in the store and online. We are new to the internet, but have years of experience operating the retail store. We started off in California in the late 1980's, and relocated to Oregon in 2004.
We operate out of a two story barn that Bob built out of the lumber from two 100-year old Oregon barns. The store is fantastic — in the summer it's cool and bright, and in the winter you can warm your feet at the pot belly stove.
We offer more than 1000 items at the store, and have at least 20 different patterns of hoes; steel rakes ranging from 6 tines to 24 tines; one to five-tine cultivators; ball weeders; hand ploughs; rock picking forks, root hooks; cradle forks for overhead pitching; mangel cutters; weed spuds; wood tine rakes; hot bed weeders and hundreds of other unique or rare implements.
We also offer sharpening of non-power pruning and other edged tools, re-handling, restoration, repair and custom tool making.
More about Bob
Bob is a frequent speaker at garden club events and conventions on various gardening topics. If you're interested in having Bob talk at one of your club meetings, or if you want to attend a class at our store, just give us a call.
Bob is a regular contributor to Fine Gardening and Garden Compass magazines. His articles have also appeared in Small Farm Today and Gardener’s Companion. He provided the text basis for the tools section of the most recent edition of the Sunset Western Garden Book.
Bob is also an inventor and has invented several items, including: garden pants with built-in knee pads; forged, solid socket trench clean out shovels with flat bottoms and turned-up sides; a combination diamond file, screw driver and multi-wrench for tool maintenance; pruning tools maintenance oil; an improved ball weeder; a pruning tool holster with pockets for a file and bottle of maintenance oil; a heavy duty watering wand and a line of hand tools with screw-on handles.
Formerly, Bob was a product development consultant to Corona Clipper Company, America’s leading manufacturer of professional pruning tools. He provided specifications, conceptual designs, field-testing and evaluation for Corona’s new generation of hand shears, loppers and hedge shears. He played a critical role in developing Corona’s complete range of garden, landscape, agricultural and construction hand tools when the company expanded its offerings in the early 2000’s.
Bob and Rita have been the subject of many magazine in Horticulture, Sunset, Garden Design, Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Times Magazine. In 2005 they were the subjects of a segment on PAX television’s People Places and Plants program.
While living in Southern California, Bob served on the advisory board and long range planning committee of The Fullerton Arboretum and as Executive Vice president of the Orange County Horticultural Society. He is a frequent and popular lecturer at botanical gardens, arboreta, garden clubs, plant societies and garden shows.
Prior to founding Red Pig Tools (formerly Denman & Company) in 1989, Bob and Rita operated an advertising and graphic design studio. A former journalist, college football linebacker and motocross rider, Bob now confines his physical activities to the smithy and the garden, feeling that there is danger and excitement enough at home.