10 Gardening Tools for Beginners

After a while doing gardening, you can accrue a shed full of garden tools — some of questionable utility. You might buy things and later find you don't use them. Or you run out of money to spend on gardening and really wish you'd gotten something that would be just right for a job you have to do.

I wanted to write out in this post a shopping list for the beginner gardener. Just a few essential things you'll need to turn soil, dig holes, spread amendments and destroy weeds. I favor hand tools myself just because they're cheap, low maintenance and you get a little exercise using them, so you probably won't see many machine-powered tools here. In any event, I'm not sure what I'm going to include just yet, so lemme get writing...

1. Leather work gloves: Your most important tools in gardening are your hands — so take care of them first. Get yourself a good, tough pair of leather work gloves that are thick enough to handle the occasional thorn and protect your hands from getting all bunged up. Of course, mine usually do anyway. I'm kinda clumsy like that.

2. Steel garden rake: Get one of these. Preferably with a nice long handle. The steel garden rake is useful for cleaning debris and dead leaves out of your flower beds in the fall, but they're sturdy enough to dig weeds out with as well. I also use them to break up tough soil, smooth out uneven ground, spread amendments and mulch over beds, and till fertilizers into the soil.

3. Mattock: One of my personal favorite hand tools, I've found the mattock to be indispensable when it comes to dealing with the thick clay soil that most of us find here in Oklahoma when we start digging. You can use these to break up clods of earth, plow rows into your soil, chop up and pry loose tree stumps, and deal with some of the tougher problems you come across in gardening — the ones that require a little muscle. Most mattocks have an extended, hoe-like scoop on one end, and either a pick or an axe-like blade on the other end.

4. Hand cultivator: There's no getting around it. When you have to weed, you've got to be up close and personal. So get down in the dirt and pound those jerks with a hand cultivator. Look for a two-sided one that has a hoe-like edge and a two- or three-pronged cultivator side. Hack away at mature weeds, or else drag the tines through moistened soil to disturb young weeds and weed seeds. It might be more comfortable to get a long-handled one, but the nose-in-the-dirt method is more effective in my experience, which is why I don't even own a hoe.

5. Sharpshooter shovel: This is the type of shovel that's most useful to the gardener. They're the kind that are skinnier than they are wide, and have a sharpish edge at the end to cut through soil. Get one with little turned-out rims so you can use your shoe or boot to apply a little extra force when needed. Real wood handles are best for all the abuse you're going to put it through. Remember that wood can spring back, but once metal bends, it's never the same.

6. The Garden Claw: I think these are made by the same people who designed the Garden Weasel, which anyone who stays up for late night TV will remember from their infomercials. This tool is pretty versatile. They can break through difficult soil, mix in amendments, stir up compost, aerate lawns, destroy weeds and break up clods of dirt. It's pretty much only limited by how strong you are, but another advantage is you don't have to bend over as much as with some other tools. As you twist it, you don't have to bend at the waist provided it's adjusted to your height.

7. Yard fork: If you make compost, there's not really a better way I've found to keep it sorted and turned than the four flattened tines of a short-handled yard fork. You can also use this tool to aerate your yard or spread mulch around.

8. Pruners: A pair of sharp pruners is needed whenever you have to harvest some herbs or deadhead some flowers. Hedge clippers are for keeping your bushes well-groomed, and loppers are for handling branches, saplings and other tough, woody stems that your garden can do without. Those three things are all the cutting power you need, but I'd choose the pruners first just because they're versatile.

9. Soaker hose: Watering plants isn't just a matter of splashing as much water as possible on them. That can be disruptive to the plants when the water comes down with enough force to damage leaves and stems, or else splash mud onto the leaves — which can spread disease. The soaker hose waters more gently and deeply, by introducing water as a mist that sprays through hundreds of tiny holes. Plus since it's a hose, you can weave it through your garden however you like. I used to keep one coiled on top of my compost heap to keep it damp. Also, this is probably the most water-efficient way to keep your plants healthy, as less water is wasted and it all goes to the plants.

10. Hand-held spreader: These are little plastic buckets, usually square, with a hand-crank on the side. Most of them have adjusters on the handle that allow to you decide how much of something to apply to your soil. These spreaders are good for applying granular fertilizers to your lawn or garden, or reseeding or overseeding your lawn. And they're less cumbersome than the kind you have to push or pull.