Gardening Supplies: Top 10 Garden Hand Tools

Commercially available gardening supplies offer a variety of garden tools for different gardening activities, like digging and stirring the soil, destroying weeds, watering, pruning, hedging, etc. Using the right gardening tools for every step of gardening helps you drastically improve efficiency and speed while lightening laborious tasks.

Here is a guide to ten must have garden hand tools.

• Shovels and spades are important garden hand tools that every gardener must have. They are meant for digging soil. The shovel has a curved scoop and a handle for comfortable gripping. The shovel's blade makes it easy to penetrate through soil, turn it and move it around. The spade has a sturdy flat blade suited for hard digging, lifting and throwing soil. It is also a good tool to mix compost. A spade with appropriate weight and length will ease physical labor.

Forged shovels and spades rather than stamped ones are robust and long lasting because they are made from a single piece of metal instead of an assembly of multiple parts.

• Trowels are short-length garden hand tools. They come with a pointed curvy scoop well suited for penetrating into soil. They are particularly useful to transplant young plants from a container to a garden. A forged trowel is sturdier than a stamped one because its blade is forged from a single sheet of metal.

• The spading fork comes with 2-4 prongs and is very useful for heavy soil digging, removing deep-rooted weeds, stirring compost, digging up bulbs and roots like potatoes, etc. It usually comes with a sturdy handgrip.

• The rake is an indispensable garden hand tool. It has short and sturdy metal prongs connected to a long handle. It is used to stir and level soil, uproot shallow-rooted weeds, rake dry leaves, etc.

• The hoe has a sharp, flat blade attached perpendicularly to a handle. It is good for stirring soil between plants adjacent to each other as in a row of herbs or vegetables.

• The dibble is a cylindrical hand garden tool with a sharp pointy tip and a handle. It is used to make holes in the soil with the tip for planting. It is particularly useful when you have many plants to be planted because it lightens the gardener's workload.

• A hand-pruner is an essential garden tool for cutting bushes, hedges, stems, ornamental trees, etc. It is sturdy and lightweight and well suited for cutting wood less than 1" thick in diameter.

• A lopper is like a pruning tool and is used for cutting fairly thick branches that a hand-pruner cannot cut. It has sharp metal blades and is particularly useful to trim vines and prune fruit trees.

• A pruning-saw is meant for pruning projects which are too tough to execute with a hand-pruner or lopper. It can easily cut branches over 3" wide in diameter. It consists of a sturdy rust resistant blade with sharp teeth and an easy handgrip.

• Without a hose, a gardener's gardening supplies would be incomplete. The hose carries water to the plants in a garden. Made of rubber or vinyl, it is long and stored as a wound coil. It is can be easily steered to supply water to any desired part of the garden.

Not all gardening tools are required for every garden. Buy your tools based on the kind of plants you cultivate.

It is very important that you use each tool specifically for its intended purpose alone. Using a tool for things that it is not meant for, will result in damages to the tool and possibly even injury to the gardener. Also remember to clean your gardening tools after each use so that they do not spread diseases. Maintain them without dirt and rust in your storage.