The Best Tools for the Vegetable Gardener

By: Carlos Herramenta
Submitted: 2007-01-17 16:21:41
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There’s an electric or electronic gadget for just about every task from crushing ice to blowing leaves and dirt from the sidewalk. However, the average homeowner is on a par with the Ethiopian subsistence farmer when it comes to the tools used for gardening. While there are motorized tillers that turn over the soil before planting seeds, these cumbersome, noisy, and often expensive devices are more suited to planting the annual vegetable garden than maintaining home landscaping and flower beds.

The kind of shovel, rake and hoe that you use in your yard are most suitable to day-to-day maintenance of your grass, trees, bushes and flowers. The shovels that are used in the yard are curved with a rounded blade at the tip of the shovel for breaking into the soil. When the user applies foot power, the shovel is driven in the hard ground. The garden shovel has a hand grip at the top and comes with a long, roughly 4-foot tapered handle or with a short handle. Both handles work well in the garden and your choice in length is merely a matter of preference.

At least two types of rakes are needed for gardening – leaf rake and bow rake. The leaf rakes is used in fall to sweep over debris and catch it in its long finger-like tines. These tines are lightweight and flexible metal or plastic. The action of raking can be especially hard on one's back muscles. Therefore, some people prefer to use a more ergonomically designed leaf rake with interesting-looking zigzag tines to eliminate stress on the back.

Hoes are an efficient tool to help gardeners rid of weeds. Quality hoes have a long handle with a hooked metal blade and a fairly sharp bottom edge. Rather than resorting to the backbreaking work of weeding by hand, these tools easily penetrate the soil and with a swift swipe will quickly and easily loosen and remove weeds from the garden area. The weeds can then be raked away.

Gardening can be rough on the hands; so, many tools are designed to make tough handwork easier. For instance, a good pair of lightweight leather gardening gloves go a long way toward protecting the hands from dirt, grass stains, thorns and more. Another useful accessory is a trowel for planting individual plants from trays or flats, which many people purchase from local nurseries. Correct preparation of the soil is important to make sure a trowel works well. A good trowel fits well into the contour of your hand. For clipping dead flowers that zap too much energy away from the healthier parts of the plant, a pair of hand pruning shears does the duty neatly. If you purchase these smaller tools along with the larger gadgets, your vegetable garden will be easier and more enjoyable to maintain. Find all the tools you need at www.ftoolbox.com

Copyright 2006 Carlos Herramenta. All rights reserved.

Carlos Herramenta runs F Tool Box to help you find information about all sorts of tools. Click below for great articles: http://www.ftoolbox.com/newsletters/

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