A rake is considered to be an essential tool when it comes to keeping your garden or yard up to date.
No one likes a garden filled with dead leaves, a latter, and an unlevelled surface that covers the entire area and hides its beauty.
These rakes also allow you to condition your soil to prepare it well for your seed sowing. The soil raking improves the general quality of the soil and enables the nutrients to reach deeper for nourishing the seeds.
Therefore, choosing the right rake is essential to maintain your yard and to manage your time.
This is because the right rake not only helps you to clean the garden but also helps in improving the quality of the soil. There are many types of rakes available in the market.
However, many people prefer either a landscape rake or a Harley rake because of their steel heads, these rakes together with removing debris and leaves from the ground, they are also ideal for removing stones and harder objects, as they are sturdy and won’t bend or damage under pressure and load of hard stones.
If you are also looking for an option and cannot decide, we highly recommend that you keep reading.
By the end of the article, you’ll be able to decide which is best for you, depending on their attachments and function.
Landscape Rake vs Harley Rake: Attachment Functionality Comparison
| Landscape Rake | Harley Rake | |
| Attachment | Used separately, also as a front attachment to tractor | Can be attached at front or at the back |
| Motor powered | No | Yes |
| Function | Remove stones, debris and even remove topsoil roots Best for soil conditioning |
Removing small rocks, grass, debris and loose superficial roots Prepare seedbed |
| Great choice | Residential and commercial use | For bigger areas; commercial industrial use |
| Works well on | Dry and wet soil | Dry soil |
| Price | Cheaper | Expensive |
Landscape Rake
If you are looking for a rake that can assist you in smoothing out the garden soil, then a landscape rake is the finest choice.
The famous Cat landscape rakes come in two different models and range from 1.5 to 1.8 working width hat deliver four to six cubic yards of capacity inside the integrated hopper and allow you to pick up a three-quarters inch to up to six-inch sized rock or gravel or trash that laying around the ground.
It is quite handy when it comes to quickly cover large sections of the garden, hence can be used on residential and commercial properties.
These landscape rakes offer you the ability to pick up the rocks, clear the ground of the trash, rip it up and deposit it in its integrated hopper from where it can be easily unloaded.
You are left with perfectly prepared leveled land for sowing your seeds.
However, the landscape rake has a wide teeth-like structure that cannot be used to clean all the leaves from the garden. Such rakes also come with long handles for efficient control of the tool.
A standard flow hydraulic two-rotor motor that also powers the gear reduction is used to power the row of the teeth driven by a chain into the ground.
This increases the amount of earth-turning torque caused by carbon steel teeth to engage the ground gravel and trash found in your yard and deposit it into the hopper.
These Cat landscape rakes also have replaceable skid shoes that allow required height adjustment to make sure you are engaging down and picking all the collected trash on the teeth.
These skid shoes are easily replaceable when worn out; hence, landscapes rakes have the edge over Harley rakes in terms of replaced worn-out parts.
Also, most landscape rakes have long and wide aluminum head that prevents them from breaking or bending. This leads to the fact that it can be used to do work that requires more toughness and reliability of the tool.
Landscape rakes are specially designed to get the job done in a short period. It is an easy-to-use and efficient tool that does many jobs at once and can be trusted.
When comparing the price of the landscape rake with a Harley rake, it turns out that it is less expensive and quite budget-friendly.
So, if you are on a short budget, a landscape rake is the best fit. This is because you will get the opportunity to enjoy all the amazing features of the tool at a fairly low price.
Harley Rake
Even though the landscape rake is user-friendly and budget-friendly, many people still prefer the Harley rake over the landscape rake and choose to use it.
This is because the Harley rake mostly comes with attachments. These attachments can be replaced with the old ones, making the work easier.
Also, you do not have to worry about the maintenance of the tool a lot, as you can just replace the attachments with a new ones. This makes the job done quickly and efficiently.
These rakes are most often tractor-mounted. Two ways to mount a Harley rake to a tractor are either attached at the back of the tractor and serve as a pull-behind unit or mounted infront of the tractor as a skid steer attachment.
A skid steer attached in front of the tractor functions as a box blade with giant caster wheels and a drum powered to turn up the dirt.
Its spinning causes the breakdown of the soil into loose dirt that is pushed back into the box to be unloaded eventually.
The motor is hidden within the frame, and the collecting drum provides optimal protection from debris and dirt being collected.
The recommended approach while leveling or preparing your ground using a Harley rake is to move in only one direction and turn in the opposite direction at around 90 degrees.
This may, however, not be possible if you are working on smaller areas, and hence the area you are working on will determine how you will use it.
A Harley rake’s typical depth is roughly 4-5 inches. They are mostly powered and are used to prepare seedbeds, cut grass and grades, and remove dirt, rocks, and gravel roads.
The attached box-shaped ends allow the power Harley rakes to contain debris, rocks, roots, stones, and grass.
The powered Harley rake is best for removing grass, stones, and superficial dirt; it is not very much recommended for removing roots that are deeper than 4 inches.
Also, removing roots may get you in trouble as they may either fail to reach the root depth you are trying to remove the roots may get tangled in the Harley rake, making your work even lengthier than easier.
Another drawback of a Harley rake is that it is not good to clear wet ground. The dirt, debris, and mud may get stuck to the rake when wet, reducing its work efficacy.
However, It is worth mentioning that the Harley rake, when used alone and not as an attachment to the tractor, has a very good build quality. The tool handle is made of wood, and the head is made of metal or aluminum.
Also, it can be used to remove the rocks, resurface, and prepare the soil, thatch, soil preparation for seeding, and grade and blend manually.
Being motor powered, it is much easier to use than a landscape rake, even when it is not used as an attachment to the tractor or skid steers.
You can do a lot of stuff by using a Harley rake. Most of this work is not possible for landscape rake to do properly. The tool has a long life and streamlined mechanism. It hardly gives you any trouble.
Although, the Harley rake is quite expensive compared to the landscape rake. But, the build quality of the tool takes the upper hand.
Also, it can be a little difficult for some people to understand how attachments work, but once they understand the tool, there is no going back.
It is a perfect fit for your garden if you want a rake that can do many tasks and has the finest quality.
The Bottom Line
To wrap it up, both rakes are unique and efficient tools to manage your gardens, farms, and other larger-scale agricultural lands.
They both are reliable for scooping, gathering, and lifting debris like rocks, stones, leaves, and other dirt from your ground while simultaneously leveling it.
Both the rakes have specific features that help them justify their cases. However, the difference between the two rakes is their price range and the build quality.
Harley rake is expensive but has high build quality. On the other hand, landscape rakes are budget-friendly, but they do not have the build quality of Harley rakes.
So, if you are looking for a budget-friendly rake, the landscape rake is a good choice, and if you want a good quality rake to do the same task, then you should go with the Harley rake.
Finally, deciding which rake works best for you is completely up to you.