When you have your first garden, it may seem like you need a whole lot of equipment. But while there are some essentials, there’s a lot you can do without.
Here is a basic tool kit:
Hand pruners: Choose bypass pruners with curved blades that move past each other, rather than straight-bladed anvil pruners, which crush stems. If you have shrubs, also get a pair of long-handled bypass loppers, which give you more leverage to cut bigger branches.
Gloves: Nytrile or rubber-coated ones keep out mud; leather or padded ones protect hands from blisters when digging.
Trowel: Get a good one with a heavy metal blade that extends into the handle. A wide one is best to start; narrower ones are good for planting bulbs.
Two buckets: One to toss weeds into and one to haul compost.
Two weeders: A snake’s-tongue dandelion weeder, which pops out taproots of perennial weeds, and a surface weeder, which you draw through the soil without harming nearby plants. There are many designs.
Drain spade or perennial spade: Its long, narrow blade is effective for making small but deep holes between existing plantings.
Sharp straight spade: If you have grass, it makes a clean, easy-to-maintain edge on turf.
Round-bladed shovel: Good for general digging.
Bow rake: Good for distributing compost, manure and mulch and roughing up lawns for reseeding.
Leaf rake: Use to collect leaves and clear lawns.
Kneeling pad or knee pads.
Hat
Tarp : For collecting leaves, hauling dirt, containing potting mess.
Mower: Get the smallest and simplest one that will do the job. For a small yard, a reel mower is the easiest thing, not to mention the cheapest, cleanest, quietest and safest. Next best is an electric mower. Gas mowers, which are hard to start, a serious air pollution problem and a noise nightmare, are a last resort for large yards. Power mowers are dangerous; always follow safety rules.
Hose: Invest in good quality rubber and save struggling with kinks. Quick connectors make it easy to switch from nozzle to sprinkler, especially with a shut-off valve added to the end of the hose.
Sprinkler: Choose one for your size of yard.
Nozzle: Get a sturdy metal one that is adjustable for spray size but not too complicated.
Timer: It will shut off the sprinkler after a couple of hours so you can set it as you leave for work in the morning.
Wheelbarrow or garden cart. Make sure it fits through your gate.
Here are tools to resist:
Leaf blower: Noisy, polluting and unnecessary. In most cases, a rake works just as well and quickly and you’ll get some exercise. If you must have power tools, choose electric over gas. The only good argument for a blower-vac: Using it as a vacuum to shred leaves for the compost pile.
Power hedge shears: They only will tempt you to shear shrubs that shouldn’t be sheared. Prune most shrubs to their natural form, and use manual hedge shears for those bushes that absolutely have to be formally sheared.
Riding lawnmower: The two-stroke engines in gas lawnmowers and leaf blowers are major sources of air and water pollution and the larger they are, the worse.
Tiller: If you need one to start a new bed, rent it. If you don’t own one, you won’t be tempted to till every year, which ruins the structure of your soil.
