Best Gardening Tools for your Yard
A good set of gardening tools make gardening an enjoyable and satisfying activity. Gardening tools are used for several activities, like trimming, cutting, digging, planting, cleaning, and watering.
A few of the basic gardening tools, such as, pruning shears, weed pullers, rakes, forks, shovels, wheel barrow, garden hose can get a lot of work done effortlessly.
Gardening Gloves
Gardening is a wonderful hobby, however, without proper protection of your hands it can turn into a thorny affair.
A good pair of glove protects your hands from pricks and scratches. Besides the prolonged use of hand tools can be hard on the palms of your hands.
Gloves should be durable, comfortable, and not too bulky. Breathable waterproof fabric gloves will keep hands cool and comfortable.
Keep the Gloves clean and store it properly.
Bypass and Anvil Pruning Shears
Pruning shears, hand pruners or secateurs is an essential gardening tool for trimming the shrubs, bushes, vegetable, or flower garden.
As you need to trim and tidy the plants based on their growth, a good pair of shears comfortable on your hand makes pruning an easier task.
There are two types of pruners.
By-pass pruners are like scissors with two sharp edges or blades. It is designed to cut live plants and green stems.
Anvil pruners are good for cutting dead wood. It has one cutting edge/blade and the other blunt edge. It can crush the live plant as one of its edges is blunt. Ratchet pruners provide extra force that is useful in cutting dry wood.
Keep the hand pruner blades in good condition so that it is easy on your hand and does not damage the plant.
Loppers (Pruners with Long Handles)
Loppers are pruners with long handles. The handles are 16 to 30 inches long.
It is useful in cutting hard-to-reach branches of trees, pruning hedges, bushes, and shrubs.
The long handle provides leverage, making cutting thicker branches easier.
Like hand pruners, there are two types of loppers.
Bypass lopper has both blades that are sharp, and hence suited for cutting live or green wood.
Anvil lopper is good for dead wood as one of its blade is blunt.
Keep the lopper blades in good condition and sharpen regularly.
Weed Puller – stand up and short handle
Stand up weed puller with a long handle makes it faster and easier to remove weeds from large yards and walkways.
You don’t have to bend or go down on knees while pulling weeds from the root and discarding it.
Small handle weed pullers are useful in hard to reach spaces or your flower and vegetable garden.
Spading Fork
A spading fork or gardening fork is a great gardening tool for turning soil as its tines are robust. The soil needs to be aerated before planting seedlings.
It also helps you to break up the hard, lumpy garden soil into crumbly compost.
Spading fork with its tines can dig into dense soil. A Spading fork with long handle is essential for turning soil in large areas.
Spading fork with short handle is useful in tight space or if you must reach the flower bed or vegetable bed to turn the soil.
Shovels and Spades
Long handle shovels and spades are the garden workhorses.
It is an excellent tool for scooping soil and digging holes for transplanting.
They are also used for edging, lifting sod, and moving dirt from one place to another.
Short handle shovels and spades are good for working on smaller tasks.
Ensure that shovel or spade has sharp cutting edges and ergonomic design.
Hoe
Garden hoe with long handle is useful in moving and levelling soil in your garden without bending.
It is also used for removing weeds, unwanted roots and material.
There are various types and sizes of hoe. A sturdy hoe with a long handle is good addition to your gardening tools. It is easy to use on tough soil as well as unwanted root lumps.
Rakes
Rakes are popular for their use in whisking away fallen leaves, grass clippings and trimmings.
A landscape or garden rake has metal tines which is perfect to level mulch or loose soil for seedling bed.
There are several types and sizes of rakes. Standard leaf rake is good for many uses.
Hand Trowels
Hand trowels are used for digging and moving soil, removing weeds, planting seeds, transplanting bedding plants and herbs.
Hand trowel with depth marker facilitates in more consistent planting.
Wheelbarrow
It is handy to have a wheelbarrow in your tool yard shed. It makes the job of mixing and hauling large quantity of compost and mulch in your garden less strenuous.
Wheelbarrow makes it easier to haul compost that needs to be mixed with the soil in various areas, such as, flower or vegetable garden bed.
Garden Hose
A garden hose with adjustable nozzle helps you to control water pressure and spray radius.
Estimate the length of garden hose you need for your yard. There are various types of hose, but a vinyl hose on spool is lighter and easier to handle.
Some of the common hose diameters are:
½-inch (avg 9 gal per minute)
5/8-inch (avg 15 gal per minute)
¾-inch (up to 25 gal per minute)
