Maybe to start a garden all you need are plants, soil, sun, and water, but gardening can be hard work without the right tools. Luckily there are plenty of garden gadgets to make it easier and more fun.

The first thing you want to start with is a pair of great fitting, lightweight, breathable gloves. Whether you’re working with sticky rose bushes or protecting your hands from the soil, our garden gloves are made with flexible spandex to provide comfort and protection for an entire weekend of gardening.

Hand tools:

In every gardener’s toolbox, you will find a set of essential hand tools, including a hand trowel, transplant trowel, and a hand cultivator/rake. Whether gardening in containers, raised beds, or directly into the landscape, trowels can be used to dig, pull up stubborn weeds, transfer soil into pots, or planting seedlings or bulbs.

Hand rakes or cultivators have strong, stiff prongs designed to dig, turn, or till the soil. These small rakes are especially good for getting tough weeds or smaller stones out of a garden bed without damaging plants as a larger rake would.

Luckily these tools often come in sets like our Heavy Duty Gardening Kit that includes three hand tools and a memory foam kneeling pad. All with our signature bright handles to make sure they won’t get lost among the flowers.

Pruning Tools:

With many different types of pruning tools, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Technically all pruners, shears, and loppers do the same job, just for different-sized plants and branches. Hand pruners typically come in a few different sizes and are rated based on how thick a branch they can cut.

Starting with Snips, these are typically used for light clipping like deadheading expired blooms or trimming and shaping herbaceous plants like strawberries or indoor plants like pothos.

Hand pruners with larger, stronger blades like our Bypass and Anvil shears are designed for thicker, woodier branches like those on shrubs like roses, boxwood, or young trees.

Loppers and Hedge Shears are for bigger pruning jobs such as trimming along the tops of large hedges or cutting 1-inch woody branches from small trees. Before starting a pruning job, make sure you’ve got the right tool for the task. (Link to recent pruner article?)

Digging Tools:

Finally, for the bigger digging jobs in the garden, you’ll need a shovel. Shovels usually come with either a rounded-point blade or a square blade. Rounded-point shovels are typically used for larger digging jobs like planting shrubs or trees, whereas square shovels are used for scooping or transplanting things like soil or mulch.

Whether you’re new to gardening or have years of experience, it can be intimidating to know what all the different tools do. Of course, what you need depends on what, where, and how you grow, but most of these tools cover the basic elements of gardening and will set you up for a successful season!