It doesn’t matter which knives you buy—they'll all need to be sharpened periodically. Besides making it easier to cut and chop, keeping knives sharp is also safer for your fingers: Dull knives can drag or skip while cutting, which can increase your chance of injury. How often you need to use a knife sharpener depends on exactly how often you use the knife, what you cut, and what surface you cut on, but professionals typically recommend sharpening once or twice a year. So, we now know that owning a garden tool sharpener makes life more efficient, comfortable, and enjoyable. In the next section, we’ll take a closer look at the different types of sharpeners available and their unique features, so you can choose the right one. What types of garden tool sharpeners are there?

We calculate the difference between the dulled and sharpened knife to see how effective the knife sharpener has been. Rebecca Treon, who also updated this piece, is a food writer, experienced home cook, and mother of two. Her work has been featured in BBC Travel, Huffington Post, Hemispheres, and Thrillist. When it comes to choosing the best garden tool sharpener, there’s a few factors to consider, including: If your knife sharpener has a fine or honing setting, run it through that once or twice after the coarse setting. Do this in the same way, but with less force. To keep your knife sharp, use the fine setting once after every couple of hours' use. To discover the best knife sharpeners on the market, we collected an array of dull knives—plus several boxes of Band-Aids—and tested their performance slicing through paper, carrots, and tomatoes (and a baguette, for serrated blades), both before and after sharpening. We also measured each knife's sharpness scientifically, using an Edge-on-Up tool to record the exact amount of force needed to cut through a standard material.A brand-new knife has (in theory) a perfectly straight blade, ground down to a precise cutting edge at a specific angle. As you use it, the metal on the edge gets damaged on a microscopic level, causing uneven spots that can get caught on foods and create a ragged tear rather than a clean cut. A sharpener does for a metal knife basically the same thing that sandpaper does for a wooden board: It shaves off a layer of uneven material to make the surface smooth and even again. Different models of sharpener use different materials and methods to remove metal, along with different methods of holding the knife in the correct position while doing so.

Finish with a honing steel for best results. Rinse and dry the knife. You may also need to clean up the area around the whetstone. We did not expect a knife sharpener at this low of a price to work as well as it does, but the Longzon 4-in-1 really delivers. As the name suggests, the manual sharpener has four slots—three successively finer ones for standard knives and an extra-wide one especially for sharpening scissors and shears. Some manual sharpeners take a little practice to use correctly, but the Longzon's design and included directions make things simple. There's even a QR code link to video instructions if you're more of a visual learner.

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Effectiveness: The Edge-on-Up tool helped give us an idea of each sharpener's efficiency, but we also tested our knives immediately before and after sharpening to gauge any noticeable differences.