There are many tools that are available to gardeners. Indeed the range can be quite confusing to the newcomer to the hobby who may be uncertain about which tools are needed to perform given tasks. Hand tools are very important for both garden creation and subsequent maintenance. However, the spade, fork, hoe and rake are the most important. Few gardens can function successfully without all of these.
Spades are essential for digging, for planting and for removing various materials such as soil and sand around the garden. They are available in varying lengths and weights, some being lightweight and especially designed for ladies. There are two main kinds of spade, the digging spade and the border variety. The latter is narrow-bladed, light in weight and used for general maintenance and planting purposes, while the digging spade is a robust tool which is intended for turning over raw garden soil during fall and winter.
Garden forks come in similar variety, there being both border and digging kinds. The border fork is mostly used for pricking over the soil amongst plants. The digging variety can perform a similar function to the digging spade except that it provides only a complete inversion of the soil, whereas the spade can be used for both trenching and double digging as well.
Hoes come in a number of configurations and are used to knock down the lumpy soils created by the spade and fork. They are also used for cultivating between plants and rows of plants as well as for taking out seed drills. The Dutch hoe is a flat-bladed tool that is used solely for cultivating while the swan neck hoe is excellent for taking out seed drills as well as mounding-up potatoes.
Rakes are usually solid tined and made of metal. They put the finishing touches to soil preparation before seed sowing. Spring-tined rakes and wooden landscape rakes are mostly used for raking up cut grass and fallen leaves, although the spring-tined variety is tough enough to be used as a scarifier. A dummy rake, which consists of a flat board on edge that replaces the tines of a wooden landscape rake is used for grading soil, especially during lawn preparation.
Apart from spades, forks, rakes and hoes, most gardeners require a number of smaller complementary hand tools. For planting small plants a trowel is necessary. This is like a much-reduced version of a spade but with a blade, which is curved and bowed. While the trowel may be regarded as the diminutive version of the border spade, the hand fork is the equivalent of the border fork. It is used in confined spaces, such as the rock garden, for pricking over the soil amongst plants.
Onion hoes are like large swan-neck hoes in shape but much reduced and with very short handles. They originated in Europe and were first intended, as the name suggests, for using amongst commercial onion crops, not only cleaning the rows of weeds, but also removing crowded plants. Now they are utilized for all hoeing tasks where a larger hoe is difficult to manoeuvre.
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