There are many useful gardening tools out there, all at different price points. When purchasing your garden tools, think about versatility. How many different ways can you use a particular tool? Most-used garden tools are simple in form, budget-friendly, and can be used for at least three or four different tasks.
It’s tempting to roam the aisles of a big box home and garden store and scoop up everything you could possibly need to build a garden tool kit. The smell of fertilizer and peat moss wafting in the air. The polished concrete floors, helping your shopping cart glide like butter to the checkout.
Our advice when building a garden tool kit? Keep it simple! Seasoned gardeners don’t use all those doodads and gadgets you can find lining the gardening aisles.
As for weeding? To rake or to spray, that is the question! Like many garden tools, you can go all out and spend hundreds of dollars on a Lithium-ion, cordless weed killer sprayer. But weed killers can be pretty icky, especially when going near vegetables. As for weeding tools, there’s really no shortage to choose from. Generally speaking, there are two types of weeding tools: short-handled and long-handled. Short-handled tools can let you be a little more precise and you only need one hand to use most of them. The downside is that you have to sit or bend over to use them. Long-handled tools are nice because you can stand and they also give you more leverage. However, these usually require two hands and it’s not unheard of to damage one of your vegetables if your aim is a little off. With that in mind, here are some of our favorite weeding tools.
In the articles below, we dive into everything you need to know about garden tools, and you can learn more about them in our How to Grow a Vegetable Garden: 10 Things Every Gardener Needs to Know Before Starting a Food Garden freebie. Enjoy!
The decision to learn how to grow potatoes in a bag is not one to be taken lightly. Are you short on garden space but still want a crop of universally delicious starch bombs? Or maybe you like science experiments. You probably fall somewhere between Mr. Wizard and Bill Nye in age and have always been drawn to DIY science like crystal-growing, rock-tumbling, and figuring out which dish soap makes the best bubble solution.
One of the issues I think almost all gardeners have dealt with at some point is figuring out how to keep garden tools from rusting. No doubt we’ve all gone to grab our favorite spade in the spring only to discover that beautiful metal we remember from last season is now brittle and brown. If […]
Some years ago, when I was a kid, I planted my first “garden.” It wasn’t exactly what you might recognize as a garden, and unless you count rocks, there wasn’t really anything growing in my garden. But the holes I dug were world class. Probably because, in all the wisdom of my single-digit years, I knew I had the best tool for digging holes for plants: a stick.
My brother has cerebral palsy and is blind. He’s spent most of his life in a wheelchair, and one of his favorite activities is gardening. He was lucky enough to go to Perkins School for the Blind on a scholarship (where Helen Keller went to school!), and even as a kid, I remember their beautiful, […]
My daughter is just about at that age where she really loves reading with me. For a while there I thought she might just be meant for parkour or extreme sports, but lately she’s down to sit for a few minutes while we read. And since we both love gardening, I went looking for gardening books for preschoolers and was not disappointed!
The only thing better than enjoying the produce from your garden is planning your garden. I could spend hours looking through seed catalogs, checking out the latest garden equipment, drawing maps of what my garden might look like, and, naturally, thinking about the best type of wood for raised beds. After all, you want something that isn’t going to rot, but you also don’t want anything treated with chemicals.
As someone who has suffered from back issues since I was a teen, and vertigo as an adult, the idea of bending over for a long time, and the standing up and sitting down over and over again routine is something I dread. So while I’m not a senior, I empathize with and actively seek […]
The mysterious USDA planting zone (aka plant hardiness zone) isn’t all that mysterious once you get to know it. It’s like the overlooked love interest in every 80’s RomCom. Always there in plain sight. Always ignored. Then one day, you wake up and realize that no, you can’t plant a banana tree in Maine. But you could have the best darn blueberries in the world. If only you had noticed earlier that your USDA planting zone was there telling you all along that blueberries are the way to go.
Learning to start canning your own foods is an exciting time! Most folks start out with water bath canning goods like jellies and syrups, and then move up to the big canning tools like a pressure canner for broths, sauces, and meats. Whether you’re learning how to can, or just need canning tools to create […]
A shovel is a shovel is a shovel. Unless we’re talking about the best shovel. Then there are all sorts of shovels. Short-handled, long-handled, rounded, round-point, square-point, serrated, trenching shovels, ditching shovels, digging spade, garden spade, perennial spade, and scoops.
