A big part of any task is having the right tool for the right job, and gardening tools are no exception. A lot of first time gardeners will often marvel at just how many tools they need and how few tools they actually have. The most essential gardening tools are going to be the ones you absolutely need to run a successful home garden. While you may be able to make due with fewer tools or some clever improvisation, these tools are going to help you exceed the minimum gardening experience and thrive at home.
1. Gardening Gloves
Every gardener needs a pair of gloves. While it is possible to garden without gloves, using gloves can make your gardening process much easier and far more comfortable. Gloves protect your hands from cuts and scrapes that can easily get infected from compost or manure. At the same time gloves protect plants from us by helping us maintain a better grip with less pressure.
The best gardening gloves are ones that are both durable and thin. If gloves are too bulky they end up being more cumbersome to work with. What you really want is something that is a very close fit, well sealed, water resistant, and flexible. Gardening gloves are a long term purchase, so aim for ones that right for you rather than choosing the cheapest ones you can find. Even the best gardening gloves can be obtained for a relatively low price, so be sure to first find the gloves that are right for you and then sort those options down to best price.
2. Hand Trowels
A hand trowel or hand shovel is going to be your number one gardening tool after gloves. We use ours for everything. Digging in the garden is core to gardening so having something to dig with is crucial.
A good hand trowel will be sturdy, have decently sharp edges, a handle with a good grip, and a narrow to medium blade. While a broader blade is good for moving dirt around, you’re more likely going to be using your hand trowel for planting, weeding, and extracting and a blade that is too broad makes that a bit more clumsy. On the other hand a blade that is too narrow can be frustrating to work with when moving soil or mixing fertilizer.
There are a lot of quality hand trowels out there, but again, these tools are long term purchases, so look for quality before you sort down by price. A good hand trowel will serve you for years while some cheap ones may need to be replaced every other year or so. Even the best hand trowels are not very expensive, so you can’t go wrong choosing for quality first.
3. A Spade or Short handled Shovel
While your hand trowel is designed for small precision digging, your spade is your earth mover. This is going to be the workhorse of your garden and easily one of the most important tools you can have at the start of any season. Spades are the number one tool when preparing your garden beds, moving compost, turning soil, and excising large rocks or hard clay patches.
A quality spade will have a sturdy handle, typically with a smaller hand grip on the back for shoveling. You’re going to want a spade with a longer blade that is squared off and had good top edging for footholds.
While a quality spade will last you your whole life, you should buy something that can be repaired and maintained easily. Hardwood handles give you the best mix of durability and portability being both strong and lightweight. Wooden handles are also easy to replace, which is a great benefit. Solid metal handles are more durable, but heavier, and do not absorb shock and vibration as well which can make using them for a long period of time less comfortable.
In many cases when maintaining your garden spade you’re going to want to remove rust, sharpen the edge, or improve the attachment between the head and the handle. Poor quality tool heads chip or fracture more easily, while better quality heads are rigid, but bend only under high stress.
4. A Garden Hose & Spray Head
Watering your plants is a frequent task for any gardener. Short of setting up an irrigation system a quality hose is an absolute necessity when it comes to the garden. A good hose will last many years, but they’re not indestructible. Be sure to pick a hose that has adequate reach for your garden, good threading to prevent leaks, and sturdy but flexible walls to ensure you can’t easily puncture the outer structure.
A good rubber hose is going to serve you quite well, but if you want to go the extra mile we recommend getting a hose with a braided outer covering. These are sturdier, easier to work with, and tend to be more flexible and easier to coil.
When picking a proper hose, the connections are essential. A great hose with bad connectors is a bad hose. Ideally you will have something with some sort of seal or outer ring, a double twist solid fastener, and the threaded area should resist bending or deformation.
The Spray head is often thought of as a separate tool, and it is sold that way, but we bundled it together here as the two go hand in hand. An ideal spray head with be durable, have solid components, a good seal, multiple settings that are easy to read and choose from, a handle lock, and be adjustable.
Cheap spray heads are either on at full blast or off and provide little control to how you water your garden. Flimsy plastic handles easily break and bad fasteners lead to poor pressure and wasted water.
It is almost always a good idea to purchase your garden hose and spray head separately as you can ensure quality on each component. That being said, not all bundles are bad, but don’t just choose the cheapest option as you’ll find yourself disappointed later on.
5. A Wheel Barrow
A good wheel barrow can turn difficult back breaking labor into a simple breeze. Wheel barrows are essential if you’re going to haul dirt, move compost, carry many trays at once, or even in disposing of weeds and other garden waste. If your homestead is big enough you’ll even find you use your wheel barrow when it comes time to harvest.
The most important thing when picking out a wheel barrow is ensuring that it has the right length pivot for you. If you are taller you’ll need longer handles on the wheel barrow or you’ll just end up hurting your back hunching over the heavy load. This starts to be a real problem for individuals who are over 6 feet tall. For shorter individuals ensure that the pivot point is low enough on the ground that you can get a good lift even if that means you get a smaller capacity wheel barrow. A well sized wheel barrow is about health and safety first.
While you have your pick of materials we tend to recommend a metal wheel barrow with solid wood handles and supports and an inflated tire. While these are not always the best bet for everything this combination of parts makes for easy repair. Wood handles are simple to maintain and replace. Inflatable tires can get new tubes or be refilled when they go flat. A metal body will hold up to heavy loads and be easier to maintain.
There are a lot of solid plastic wheel barrows out there, but they often cannot be repaired and fail under stress. They’re not bad and will certainly get the job done, but in our experience they don’t tend to last as long. If you do go the plastic route, you’ll want to find one that has a metal frame and handle as they will be more easily affixed to the plastic than wood and create far fewer break points for heavy loads.
6. The Garden Fork
Garden forks are small hand held forked digging implements with a curve at the end of the tines. The shape provides good leverage and the tool is used to turn or til soil by hand as well as remove weeds by the roots. Some might find it strange that the garden fork is on the list, but it’s a real important tool when it comes to getting into and breaking up soil. We didn’t have one for our first few gardens and it was a disaster tilling manually and removing weeds by hand. Once we came around to using the garden fork we found we never wanted to go back to doing things the hard way again.
A good garden fork is going to be strong and have fairly narrow tines. The tines should have a decently steep curve at the end, not just go straight out. Solid steel garden forks will last a life time. Avoid hard plastic handles as they become brittle over the years and often cannot be replaced when they break.
7. The Garden Knee Board
Knee boards are one of those things you just don’t think about until you need it. With any sizeable garden you’re going to spend a lot of time kneeling down and that can be rough on your knees. While younger gardeners might eschew this good advice, trust us, a knee board will save you later in life.
Unlike most of the tool we recommend a good knee board will not last you a lifetime. Typically they are dense foam with a bit of give and will wear out from use and from the elements. Typically a good garden knee board will last you 3-4 years before needing to be replaced.
8. Pruning Shears
A good pair of pruning shears will see a tremendous amount of use in the garden. Depending on what you grow, pruning may be an essential part of raising a healthy plant and could even be required for proper branching and wintering of certain crops.
An ideal pair of garden shears will be hardened and resist both denting and bending. They should be able to stay sharp, but also should be able to be sharpened. Many garden shears are not meant to be used for a lifetime and once they have dulled are nearly impossible to repair, so avoid super cheap shears as you’ll just end up buying new ones each year.
Garden shears follow the same advice as all out other tools in that you should look for shears with solid handles that have a good grip. Thin plastic handles can break during the course of normal use and are best avoided.
9. A Watering Can
While a good hose might reach most of the plants you’re growing, a watering can is one of those tools that is essential for areas that are harder to reach. Sure, you might be able to reach everything with a hose, but in the case that you can’t a watering can is a solid investment. We tent to prefer metal watering cans over plastic ones simply to avoid contamination from cheap plastic, but this is not a common problem. Certain metal cans should not be used in combination with liquid fertilizers which can react with the metal, follow your fertilizer’s instructions to avoid any issues.
10. A Rake
There is no shortage of mess that a garden can make. A good sturdy rake will make quick work of a lot of messes in your yard. Be it from weeding, grass clippings, or spilling loose dirt, a rake makes quick work of a lot of mess. Rake are also instrumental in spreading mulch and ground cover.
A good rake follows similar rules as a good shovel. Wooden handles are often easiest to replace and are the best of both worlds when it comes to strength and shock absorption. There are all different kinds of rakes you can use, but for most clean up tasks a simple and flexible fan rake will do best. We prefer metal tines on our rakes, but have known plastic ones to work just fine for this kind of labor.
Don’t Skip Out on Key Tools You Need for Your Garden!
These 10 tools seem simple, and they are for the most part, but they are critical to a successful garden. Ensuring that you have these essential gardening tools will leave you prepared for just about anything your garden can throw at you. Yes there are a thousand more tools you can and probably should buy, but with the ones we’ve listed here you’re going to be well equipped to face your garden and get to work on your homestead.