The backyard, garden, and patio are the places where you can add your personal touch to expand the home’s exterior. To properly prepare plants and maintain a healthy and attractive garden, you need the correct gardening tools. But do you know the proper function of each garden tool, and do you use them correctly?
In our last article, we shared many basic and useful gardening tools. Here, we would like to share more tools that can help ease your task and make gardening fun.
Garden Hoe
Garden Hoes are the most useful tools in spring when we’re preparing the garden for planting. The hoe blade is perfect for weeding, chopping through unwanted growth, and clearing out your garden beds. You can also use it to spread compost in tight spaces.
Types of hoes, sizes, and shapes of the blade will be determined by the kind of gardening you want to do. You may need a full hoe if you’re dealing with large areas of dirt or vegetable gardens. For flower gardens, a fine blade may work easier. Choose a blade width based on your needs; you might want to buy multiple hoes of different sizes to handle a wider variety of projects.
Hose / Spray Nozzles
Unless all of your plants are in self-watering containers, you’ll need to water your nursery garden. If you have a yard, a garden hose will be the best way to water your plants. While some urban gardeners can get away with just watering, traditional hoses are still very common in gardening. We recommend a lightweight, expandable hose that is easier to maneuver.
Make sure you get an adjustable spray nozzle while purchasing a hose. These help you control the water to save from wasting any water. They also help you manage the way the water is delivered. Many spray nozzles have adjustable spray patterns, allowing you to mist newly planted seeds and seedlings while soaking established plants like tomatoes or flower bushes that need lots of water in the heat of summer.
Wheelbarrow
If you’re lucky enough to have a beautiful big yard to garden in, you’ll find that a wheelbarrow or a garden cart will make your jobs so much easier than you imagine. Wheelbarrow moves dirt, compost, and even piles of leaves effortlessly across your garden property. They’re also a great helping hand when transporting new seedlings to your garden bed. A traditional wheelbarrow design will be best if you’re often moving soil.
Loppers
If you have trees or shrubs that need pruning, a simple pair of shears won’t help much. Loppers are the perfect tool for controlling your hedges or removing diseased branches.
A nice pair of loppers will allow you to cut branches up to 1-2” diameter. Generally, loppers can cut thicker branches if you can afford the extra cost.
Weeder
Gardeners’ favorite tool is a weeder. Luckily, there are a few handy tools to use to battle weeds in your garden for weeding. The first is a hand weeder, also known as a dandelion digger. It’s designed to help remove weeds with a taproot, with the tines penetrating the soil to pull out the weeds easily.
Many gardeners prefer stand-up weeders to push the spikes into the ground, press down on the lever with your foot, and grab the weed and its roots in no time. They’re the best tool to use if you have back problems or a ton of dandelions to remove from your yard.
Hori Hori Garden Knife
Hori Hori garden knife is a stainless steel blade that is slightly curved with a sharp edge and a serrated edge that makes it perfect for cutting through soil or roots—sometimes referred to as a garden knife. Some people even use it as a weeder. Campers also find a hori-hori knife helpful in digging into hard-packed dirt or prying up rocks under their tent.
Spading Fork
A spreading fork is a digging fork, garden fork, or grip. Similar in appearance to a pitchfork, it is meant for turning dirt and soil. Usually, it has four sturdy tines perfect for loosening hard dirt and sifting soil. It’s also nice to mix fresh compost into established beds.
It is perfect for raking out weeds and breaking up clumps of dirt in tight spaces in already-established gardens.
Pruning Saw
If you have branches too thick for your lopper to cut, a pruning saw is the tool you need for this challenging task. These tools are the middle ground between a lopper and a handsaw. One pruning saw can cut through branches up to 8 inches thick, perfect for pruning trees in your yard or shrubs and plants.
If you’re trying to minimize the number of garden tools you own, I recommend getting a good pair of pruning shears.
Edger
As you might guess from the name, an edger creates edges in your garden. But an edger cuts a clean line in the soil between the grass and a sidewalk or driveway. They’re generally designed in a half-circle shape with a lip on the top where you can press the tool down with your feet. To use the tool, you place the blade where you want to create the edge and then step down to cut into the soil and rock the edger side to side before moving down to repeat the steps.
This fantastic tool is specialized and has few uses, but if you want to create clearly defined lines in your yard, it’s the perfect way to separate the grass from your garden. The lines created will make your yard and pathways look tidy and well-planned.
