GARDENERS could help schoolchildren and community groups as well as help cut crime, by handing over their worn or broken tools.

A York garden centre is holding a two-week garden tool amnesty and will donate all tools given to a scheme that involves prisoners in repairing them.

The aim is to turn broken spades, rakes and forks into usable tools that children can use to learn about gardening and that can help not-for-profit organisations maintain and develop their gardens.

Michael Parker, manager of Poppleton Garden Centre, which is running the amnesty, said: “It’s the third year we have run an appeal like this.

“The initiative applies to tools such as trowels, spades, hand and garden forks, hoes, good old-fashioned garden rakes and lawn rakes, but not power tools, which are those powered by electricity or which are petrol-driven.”

Gardeners can hand in their old hand tools at the garden centre, in Northfield Road, Upper Poppleton, from tomorrow, so they can be given to the Conservation Foundation’s Tools Shed programme.

The organisation will then send them to UK prisons where inmates will repair and refurbish the tools ready for them to be donated to schools and community groups.

The prisoners repair the tools as part of their rehabilitation and to encourage them to learn skills that can help them lead a straight life on their release. The scheme runs until Sunday, February 28.

To encourage gardeners to take part, the garden centre is offering 20 per cent off vouchers off new tools bought at the centre during the two weeks of the amnesty to anyone who brings in tools.