A decade ago, my wife and I built an absurdly ambitious garden that involved homemade fencing, a bamboo-and-string trellis for the beans and, for me, about 10 backbreaking hours behind a tiller.

As we planted, a neighbor strolled by, grinning. “Growing some deer food?”

Hilarious!

Weeks later, our little farm verging on a big harvest, we awoke to find the fence trampled, the trellises flattened and the vegetables gone.

It was farmageddon. Or armagardden. Or hell.

I have since avoided gardening, and not just because of the deer. Knee and elbow surgeries killed what little enthusiasm I had for digging and kneeling, so I limit my harvesting activities to the produce aisle.

In recent years, though, I heard enough about the virtues of ergonomic gardening tools that I thought it might be worth another shot. But first, I queried a trio of gardening specialists: Barbara Pleasant, a gardening author and contributing editor to Mother Earth News; Pam Ruch, who managed the test gardens for Organic Gardening magazine; and Bruce Butterfield, the research director for the National Gardening Association.

My question: Is the buzz surrounding ergonomic gardening tools just noise, or have there been legitimate innovations lately? Their answers could put some fresh veggies on my family’s table this summer (if the deer don’t get to my new garden first).

“When I started gardening 30 years ago,” Pleasant said, “hand tools had wooden handles that rotted and splintered, and the only hoes we had were designed to chop cotton. Are today’s lightweight tools with easy-to-grip handles better? Yes, they are.”

The first such tool that bears mentioning is the only one that all three panelists went out of their way to rave about: the Cobrahead weeder and cultivator, manufactured in Cambridge, Wis. The business end of the tool looks like a longshoreman’s hook but with a flare resembling a cobra’s hood. It comes in two versions, for close work and for standing work.

Pleasant said she’s “gotten kind of dependent on it.”

Butterfield said it’s the most efficient tool for taking out weeds, “and it’s built like a Russian dump truck so it won’t break.”

Ruch acknowledged that the conventional handle doesn’t exactly scream “ergonomic” in the era of molded, rubber-coated instruments. “But it’s the best all-around tool for the garden, because you don’t use a twisting motion,” she said.

Ruch favors bypass pruners, as opposed to anvil pruners, for their ease of use. “And everybody loves Felco pruners,” she said. “You can buy spare parts for them, which is great. But Bahco pruners seem to stay sharper longer, and I’ve never lost a part on them. I may be switching my allegiance.”

Bahco and Fiskars sell pruners with front handles that rotate toward you when you squeeze them, further reducing hand and wrist strain. (I tried Bahco’s Professional PXR-M2 and the Fiskars PowerGear pruner.) Fiskars last year added a gel pad to the PowerGear pruner for further comfort, and it still weighs less than the Bahco PXR-M2.

The Corona ComfortGel 3⁄4-inch bypass pruner, meant for smaller jobs than the Fiskars and Bahco models I tested, felt lighter than both, and although its ComfortGel handle didn’t rotate, it was quite nice to hold.

For planting and digging jobs that are easy on the joints, curved tools are becoming more common. They allow users to align their wrists to suit their preferences.

Pleasant and Ruch recommended the Transplanter Pro, by Radius, which is akin to a shovel and features a circular handle and a narrower blade. Radius also builds a line of hand tools for the garden, including a scooper, weeder, transplanter, cultivator and trowel, each with a curved handle.

Until this year, Radius sold its tools exclusively through specialty garden retailers, but this spring the hand tools began appearing in mainstream hardware stores under the Miracle-Gro brand.

Perhaps no tool epitomizes the old one-size-fits-all approach to gardening tools as much as the shovel. Ruch said she had heard good things about, but had not yet tested, the HERShovel designed for women.

HERShovel was developed by Green Heron Tools, a Pennsylvania-based start-up led by two women who enlisted the help of ergonomic researchers and female farmers. The result is a shovel with a D-shape handle, a shorter shaft and an angled blade that features oversize areas for foot placement. The makers say the design accounts for the fact that women rely more on lower body strength when shoveling.

The shovel weighs about four pounds and comes in three sizes. I’m 6-foot-2, and the large version worked fine for me; I liked the handle as much as the one on the Transplanter Pro, and both were considerably better than my old dinosaur shovel.