When preparing for gardening projects, start by making an inventory of your gardening tools. These are the basic tools that any gardener should have. Buy the best-quality tools you can afford, as the tools you choose will shape your experience and the quality of your garden for years to come.
Hand Trowel: An absolute essential for a gardener, whether a novice or a professional. Look for a trowel whose blade is made of steel.
Hand Hoe: A short-handled hoe for weeding and cultivating.
Hand Cultivator: A tool used with a chop-and-pull motion, which allows the curved prongs to remove weeds and scratch up crusted soil.
Micro-Tip Blade: A tool equipped with sharp blades perfect for precision cutting.
Pruners: Great for cutting branches up to 1/2-inch thick, these are "bypass" shears, which cut like scissors and make cleaner cuts. Make sure to buy a model with a replaceable blade.
Shovel: For breaking into hard soil or shifting piles of soil, sand, or compost.
Rake: An absolute necessity for combing rocks and clods out of a bed and leveling the soil for seed sowing.
Tool Maintenance
Once you've found tools that suit you, you'll want to keep them in optimum shape; with proper care, a good spade can last a lifetime.
Sharpen your cutting tools along with the blades of shovels and spades with a whetstone. When sharpening a blade on a stone, simply slide the blade over the flat surface in one direction until you reach desired sharpness. And, make sure you have replacement blades.
Using an oil-based paint on your tool's handles is a great way to identify that trowel lying amidst the greenery in your garden. Stenciling the handles of tools is a great way to keep them clearly and easily identified as your own.
To prevent your tools from rusting, pour a container of motor oil into a bucket of sand. Then, every time you use your tools, rinse them off, dry the blades thoroughly, and insert them into this grainy oil and sand mixture -- it's a Good Thing.
Special Thanks
Special thanks to Johnny's Seeds for giving catalogues to our studio audience. Special thanks to Fiskars for giving micro-tip blades to our studio audience.
