10 Essentials Tools That You Need in Your Garden

Doing garden work is not easy. Especially when you have something that needs critical handling, you’ll have to know what you’re doing. Luckily, the right tools can always help.

More important than knowing what to do is having the right tools. If you are someone who’s thinking of building a completely functional tool rack for garden accessories, then you’ll need to have all the most useful ones. Then, even the hardest garden job will be a piece of cake.

Each one of the following tools will have a specific job to do. If you forget getting one of these, then your tool rack will be incomplete. Without further nonsense, here’s the list:

1. Garden Gloves

To prevent damage to your hands and stay clean while working on your garden, it’s always essential to use gloves.

There are many options to go for. You’ll have nitrile gloves, the washable and more temperature-resistant choice. They offer great dexterity as well, so you can grab and handle small things more easily. Nitrile gloves also come in a wide array of color options so you can pick the ones you prefer.

Then you have leather gloves. These are the heavy-duty option for those who do the most demanding operations. Whenever you’re digging holes, cleaning, or carrying logs or branches, then leather gloves will do. They keep your hands more protected than any other option.

Finally, you have latex-coated cotton gloves. They are like mittens but with a latex coat that makes them waterproof. You can use these as a mix of both nitrile and leather gloves. They are like an option for those who like decent dexterity but also proper resistance and strength.

2. Garden Chaps

You don’t only need to protect your hands, but you also need to protect your legs and underclothes. For that, there’s nothing better than a pair of chaps.

They usually come with knee pads and cover all your lower body. Some of them come directly from the top like fishing waders. You can pair them up with the right pair of pants and boots, making them practical to keep dirt away from your clothes while protecting specific parts of your body.

You won’t have to tear your clothes or get swelled knees anymore. Just use the right pair of garden chaps, and you’ll stay cleaner and more protected while working on your garden.

You can even pick different colors that fit well with the gloves. So, you can do your garden work while looking fabulous.

3. Digging Tools

Then you’ll need tools for digging in the dirt. Here you’ll find many different options to go for. We’re recommending the four most useful ones:

• Digging Fork

A digging or spade fork is among the most valuable tools you can get. It looks exactly like a fork but with a small handle. The whole purpose is to get the dirt off the ground loosely. It works wonders for aerating small dirt areas, adding compost or fertilizers, and loosening patches when needed.

• Shovel and Spade

A shovel is the most common tool you’ll find in gardens. As you know, it is used for taking dirt off the ground. It’s beneficial for things like planting new vegetation, opening deep holes for burying stuff or installing different things, and so on.

A spade does the same job as a shovel but in a small design that works better in edges and small operations.

• Garden Hoe

Not many people use or even know what garden hoe is for. But it’s always a useful product to have.

The whole purpose of a hoe is to break hard ground to either dig holes or make it more manageable. It looks similar to a hammer but with a thin head called blade that gets through the dirt quickly.

You could get a standard hoe plus an oscillating hoe. The oscillating kind does the same but with a swivel head. This swiveling helps to raise more dirt than usually but loses some strength in the process. So, you get the same effect but for softer soil and with more manageability. 

• Garden Trowels

Similar to spades in design and purpose, garden trowels are essential as garden tools. The particular factor about them is that you can use them more easily for tucking or inserting stuff into the soil. When you want to add small plants seeds in the ground, you use trowels.

Some of them even come with inch marking, so you know how deep you’re inserting the seeds or plants inside the soil. And to do that, they usually come with tall edges and let seeds or anything inside the trowel travel uncaringly through the ground along with the blade of the spade.

There are thousands of options for garden trowels, so we always recommend the most comfortable ones possible.

4. Dividers & Earth-Openers

Sometimes you don’t need to make holes or dig; you just need to move soil around or handle it according to your needs. For this purpose, you need to use dividers and earth-openers, such as:

• Perennial Dividers

These are uncommon nowadays, but they are hugely useful for those who know what they do.

They look like a small shovel with a heart-shaped head. This head allows you to separate weeds from grass, or plants from others. If you are cleaning a lawn or garden and need something practical to break branches or get stuff out the soil, then a perennial divider is your tool. They also help to edge soil beds & give shape to small gardens.

• Grip Knife

This is a knife that comes with small edges, helpful to cut weeds, plant seeds, and dividing small plants. You can also use it for bedding vegetation and cutting branches. It’s very similar to a spade, but with a knife design, so it does a handy job for gardening.

• Dibber

A dibber is a piece of wood or metal that opens a hole in the ground without having to dig. Most dibbers have the whole purpose of opening a large-enough space for you to pour seeds inside. They commonly come with marks in inches, so you know how deep you’re going depending on your needs.

5. Hand Pruners and Loppers  

There aren’t better tools for clipping branches and plants than pruners and loppers. You could say they are cutting tools, but they have their own category because they are critical in their own way.

The ability of a hand pruner to cut branches is incredible. They offer a blade design with exceptional sharpness for easy cutting. You won’t have to make too much of an effort to cut. And if case you need to, the design of the handles allows you to make sharp cuts without problems.

They are useful to cut weeds, get rid of overgrowing plants, pruning perennials, and much more. However, they only work with branches or plants that aren’t too thick.

In case you need to cut thick vegetation, then you’ll need a lopper. They offer the same purpose as a pruner but with a way larger design. The design focuses on a thick set of blades, but what stands out the most is the design of the handles.

They are large and straightforward to open, so you can eventually close it with more strength and cut very thick branches easily. Some loppers even come with extendable handles for reaching taller or more difficult places.

6. Cutting Tools

After learning about pruners and loppers, you need to get familiar with the less common but still useful cutting tools. Each one has its own purpose and goes well with all the previous tools. Here they are:

• Japanese Knife or Hori-Hori

Gardening professionals love the hori-hori because it does almost everything well. From digging the soil to dividing plants, weeding, and cutting – the Japanese garden knife does it all.

Some people even use the hori-hori for measuring if it has the inches marks. This comes pretty handy when planting seeds or digging. Most of these Japanese knives come in a sheath and with steel construction, so they are not only useful but also durable.

• Pruning Saw

Everyone knows what a saw does, but not everyone knows what a pruning saw is. They are like standard saws in purpose, but the design is way smaller to fit tight spaces more efficiently and provide better performance.

Pruning saws are mostly useful for cutting small branches from small trees or plants. Thanks to the razor-tooth blade design, you can easily serrate branches without making much of an effort.

• Shears

These are similar to pruners but thinner. They work perfectly to cut small branches, shrub, and giving shape to ornamental plants and grasses. You can also use them to get rid of weeds and cutting clumps of perennials. Shears are versatile and often pretty useful, sometimes even more than pruners.

• Scissors

Sometimes you don’t need shears or pruners but scissors. Where you need to cut things such as flowers and the smallest plants without doing any harm, then scissors will do the job. Cuttings herbs and delicate plants are the most useful job for scissors, especially the thinnest ones.

7. Garden Forks

Forks are also pretty useful to have on your garden deck of tools. But there are several types of forks to choose. Here we focus on the two most common ones:

• Standard Fork

They are typical forks with nothing special, just the three or four tines (teeth) that help to open small holes or move soil around. A standard fork also helps to loosen or lift dirt so you can either dig more efficiently or just plant seeds without much effort.

Just consider that the more tines or teeth a fork has the more strength and lifting capacity it will provide. If you pick a fork with many tines, it will probably be more useful than one with only a few.