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What Hand Gardening Tools Do You Really Need?

By: Rex Magnum
Submitted: 2008-04-29 14:56:01
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You probably have a shed full of large gardening tools, such as rakes, hoes, and spades, but you may find them to be a little large for some of the jobs around your garden and lawn. In these instances, smaller tools would be nice, and they are. You can use miniature-sized gardening tools for small spaces. Lots of times there are jobs that you hate having to haul the big tools out for, and hand tools eliminate that problem. You will find that a trowel, a cultivator, a weeder, a garden fork, and a pair of pruning shears will provide you with hours of useful service.

All the Essential Hand Gardening Tools

A garden trowel is one of the essentials of any hand gardening tool kit. When you buy one, look for one with a pre-sharpened stainless steel blade which will cut through the ground easily. A larger blade will be more efficient when working in larger areas. You also want to find a trowel with a coated head which will help it resist rust.  Trowels are used to dig holes for both planting and transplanting.

When it comes to aerating and loosening soil in small beds, you can’t beat a garden cultivator (a.k.a. claw). It will also do an excellent job of digging weeds out from between plants. When buying a claw, you will find models with different-sized heads. A larger head will cover the ground more quickly, but it’s also more cumbersome to use close to flowers and harder to fit into smaller spaces. Make sure the blades of your claw are made of pre-sharpened stainless steel which will cut through hard soil more easily. 

You’ll love having a weeder in your hand gardening tool kit. Look out you nasty-looking dandelions popping up in the yard! A weeder looks a lot like a trowel except it has sharp, serrated blades for putting tough-rooted weeds in their place. A basic weeder has a rounded fulcrum to pop deep-tough weeds right out of the ground. Back blade winters pull and cut roots and weed stems. 

A smaller version of the large garden forks is another handy tool that needs to be included in your home gardening tool kit. Having both a much-shorter handle and a smaller head than a full-sized fork, it will allow you to attend to the finer details of your garden without damaging plants. Choose a fork that has durable, stainless steel tines which are mounted on a solid hardwood handle. You will use your garden fork for weeding, loosening and cultivating soil, and to mix compost into your ground.

There will be a lot of pruning work to be done around your yard, so you will need a pair of pruning shears to round out your home gardening tool kit.  Because you will use them for heavy-duty cutting jobs, choose a pair that have high-quality hardened steel heads, blades that can be replaced when needed, and small notches to help you cut any wires you may encounter. Your pruning shears will make it easier to cut green and woody stems. 

When you buy hand gardening tools, always buy the best you can afford. They’re going to be items you use again and again, and you’ll want them to last. There are many different kinds of tool organizers on the market, too, which you can use to both store your tools and as a carrier to tote them around the yard with you.  You’ll find you can’t possibly garden without these great tools.

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