Hello, for the past four years I have been gardening and planting balled and burlapped trees at my job, we used 30-36" steel hooks to easily grasp the wire baskets on the tree root balls. These hooks easily allowed us to manipulate heavy root balls, and slide them into the planting holes.

I've since changed jobs, and no longer have access to those old handy "root hooks" we used (I don't know the proper name for the tool), and I would like to buy some.

However, after scouring the web, I can't find this tool, that is so simple and I thought would be ubiquitous in the nursery / gardening trade... The closest I could come was a "hay hook," but these are generally much shorter than I'd like, and have their handles perpendicular to the hook instead of in-plane with it.

Basically, I'm looking for a hook much longer than a hay hook (30-40"), and with a handle in plane with the hook, maybe something that looks like this:

/___________D (very roughly, of course)

Has anyone seen these, what are they called, and where can I buy them? Thank you!!