10 Must Have Gardening Tools That You Need To Start Gardening [Buying Guide]
Overwhelmed by the many garden tools for sale? On a limited budget and can only afford the basics? Here are the 10 must have gardening tools you need.
Gardening like so many other hobbies can evolve into a storage shed or garage full of every imaginable tool.
Tool catalogs and gardening magazines have pages and pages of tools that promise to make gardening easier.
However often these sit collecting dust and rusting away as they end up not being that useful.
Let’s look at what garden tools I think are a good starting point for someone just getting into gardening.
Here are the well-used tools I pulled out of my garden shed. A compact, well rounded set of tools for the beginner to get started with growing food and maintaining their garden. Read on for details and my recommendations from Amazon.
Best Garden Gloves
While many gardeners including myself prefer to work without gloves for some tasks, there are times when you need a decent pair of gloves.
Cutting raspberry or rose bushes without gloves is a prickly affair.
And in winter or on those cool days in spring or fall a pair of gloves makes gardening a bit more bearable as it keeps your hands warmer.
My recommendation from Amazon:
I’ve been happy with the Atlas line of gloves and they have many kinds, including insulated ones for winter.
Showa Atlas 772 M Nitrile Elbow Length Chemical Resistant Gloves, 26″, Yellow
If you really don’t like getting your hands and arms messy when it’s wet and muddy outside, you might want to also consider adding a pair of muck gloves. They also will protect your hands from scratches and scrapes when pruning raspberries, blackberries or roses.
Best Short-handled Garden Tools
Short-handled garden tools are convenient as you can use them in planters, containers and raised beds. You can pop them in your pocket or throw them into a garden trug to carry them with you.
A good trowel is used for digging holes for planting seeds and transplants, moving soil around and measuring distances between plants and depth of holes.
If your trowel doesn’t have measurements engraved on it like the one I own, then at least measure the length of the head, note it down on the handle with a permanent marker and then you can use that as a rough measurement.
My recommendation from Amazon:
A good weeder is used for digging up dandelions or other weeds with large taproots.
There are lots of different ones on the market, some work better than others. I really like the one I have as it is strong, pointy and has serrated edges which helps get into hard ground better. I’ve linked to a similar one below.
Of course you could just use your trowel for weeding but mine is bent from trying to dig out dandelions and I find it never goes deep enough and is too wide.
Pruners are also called secateurs.
A good pair kept sharp and clean will cut through fairly thick branches but also can be used to trim delicate branches and even harvest certain vegetables (just make sure they were not used previously to cut any poisonous plants without a good washing).
Just don’t try to cut something that is too thick or cut wire or other hard materials that can damage the blade. Buy a pruner where you can replace the blade.
Best Long-handled Garden Tools
Long-handled garden tools are more convenient as they avoid stooping or kneeling in wet soil.
A rake is very useful for smoothing out soil before planting after you have used your hoe or shovel to loosen up and weed. You can either use it tines down or up. A basic tool that lasts forever if you take care of it.
A hoe is the garden tool most liked by Santa Claus (“Hoe, Hoe, Hoe!”). But seriously if you need to loosen up soil between rows of plants and weed quickly this is a must have. Having the back side as a two prong cultivator is handy but you need to be careful then not to damage your plants with the side that is up.
Keep it sharp and it will slice through annual weeds easily just below the surface of the soil.
While you might be able to get away with just the trowel, for digging any deeper holes, digging up large vegetable plants such as parsnips, digging up bushes and moving larger amounts of soil or compost a large shovel will make your job much easier. Just be careful as a shovelful of heavy clay soil can weigh a lot and you can easily strain your back if you don’t lift properly.
I prefer having a pointed shovel for digging work.
And I also have a rectangular spade for scraping up soil from pavement or cutting into sod. Not 100% necessary, so you could skip it.
Best Outdoor Water Hose
If you have a small garden or just have containers you can probably skip this purchase and just use a watering can. But if you have garden beds or lots of containers, lugging around heavy watering cans is going to get tiring very quickly.
Even if you have an underground sprinkler system or drip irrigation system like I have, a hose is handy for watering outside of the system’s schedule. Or use it when power washing your walkways, deck, patio, etc.
I’ve written a review of the Flexilla line of hoses. In the same article I also link to a decent hose hanger and spray nozzles.
Best Outdoor Watering Cans
You might be able to get away with just the hose but it requires having the right nozzle and fine control over the water volume. And if you have a second floor deck like I have getting the hose up there can be a hassle.
I mix in liquid fertilizer every week or two when I water my pots to keep the nutrient levels up. Good exercise too having to move from the hose bib or rainwater barrel to the garden with a full watering can.
I recommend this large inexpensive one is a good general purpose watering can. You can buy two so that you can carry one in each hand for better balance.
Or you can spend more and get a can that is better balanced. I inherited my mother’s can as she no longer needed it.
I also have the small version that has a fine rose on it for watering my seedlings in the greenhouse.
Best Garden Trugs
With all of these tools that you can use to dig up, cut and weed you will also need something to carry the waste to your compost or your municipal garden waste bin.
Garden Trugs are very handy for that purpose – they are easily washed, durable, flexible so you can pour things out without making (too much) of a mess and they come in bright colours that you can’t lose in the garden:
However if you have a limited budget to spend on your garden tools, any container works for collecting debris – just reuse something that you would otherwise recycle such as a cardboard box or a large shopping bag.
It looks like you might have to spend a bit of money to outfit your garden tool shed with enough tools to get started.
But you might want to first check out garage sales, estate sales, your local online classifieds and friends that might be upgrading their tools or have duplicates before you run out to the garden centre or home centre or order stuff online.
Just ensure the tools are in good working condition – tools that are excessively rusty usually indicate that the owner wasn’t careful with them.
So what tools have I left out? Quite a bit actually going by what is sold in a garden centre, home centre and in garden tool catalogs.
At some point maybe you will need spiked sandals to aerate your lawn, a sod lifter when you get tired of tromping all over your lawn with the spiked sandals, and a seed spreader when you change your mind about getting rid of the lawn!
But don’t buy it now until you are sure you need it and need it often enough. For one-off use you may want to borrow from a fellow gardener or rent.
