If you didn’t receive everything on your Christmas list, you may want to consider being your own Santa.  After all, there are some “gotta have ‘em” in all facets of life.  If you want to smoke a pork butt, you need an off-set smoker and some apple wood.  If you’re going to garden, there are 5 essential tools:

1. 4-Pronged Pitchfork – really effective for loosening the soil and getting it ready for planting, especially for veggie gardens, perennials and lawns.
2. Sod Spade – very helpful for planting trees, shrubs, perennials, annuals and bulbs and stripping off sod to change an area from a lawn to something else.
3. Tote Bag – very handy for putting snipped off blooms, weeds and twigs/stems into.  In the fall, a large tote bag works better than a paper lawn/leaf bag.
4. Thick Garden Gloves – ever pruned a rose bush without leather or thick fabric gloves?  Nuff said.
5. Bypass Hand Pruners – real gardeners don’t use anvil pruners.  A much sharper and cleaner cut will result from using bypass pruners.

10 Tools That Gardeners Should Also Have

In addition to the above 5, there 10 others that would be good to have, or at least be able to borrow:

1. Stiff Rake – works great for smoothing out new veggie and lawn seed beds.
2. Leaf Rake – if you have a tree, your neighbor has a tree, or there is a tree in the neighborhood, you probably should have a leaf rake.
3. Kneeling Pad – if you’re spending more than 15 minutes planting perennials, a foam kneeling pad decrease the pain the next day.
4. Watering Wand – sure, you can blast your plants with a hose, but a wand will provide a soft, gentle stream and won’t damage your plants.
5. Watering Can – portable water; preferably with a gentle stream attachment.
6. Soaker Hose – great for slow, steady application of water.
7. Pruning Saw – cuts branches from shrubs and small trees up to 4 inches in diameter.
8. Lopping Shears – long handled version of a bypass hand pruner, for stems up to ½ inch in diameter.
9. Gallon Sprayer – a 1 gallon sprayer allows you to spot spray weeds in the lawn instead of the whole lawn.
10. Nitrile Gloves – important for protecting your hands while spraying insecticides, herbicides and fungicides.

1 More to Consider

Hari-Hari aka Hori Hori Knife – this 4 in one tool digs, cuts, loosens and removes weeds, all with the same tool.  But, watch out; it’s sharp and not for use when kids are around.

John Fech

Horticulture Extension Educator at Nebraska Extension

John Fech is a horticulturist with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and certified arborist with the International Society of Arboriculture. The author of 2 books and over 200 popular and trade journal articles, he focuses his time on teaching effective landscape maintenance techniques, water conservation, diagnosing turf and ornamental problems and encouraging effective bilingual communication in the green industry. He works extensively with the media to extend the message of landscape sustainability, making over 100 television and radio appearances each year.