Having the essential gardening tools for the beginner is vital to all your gardening projects. It’s best to use the right gardening tools for beginners to get the best results each time.
And even though it is easy to buy too many tools at once, tools are still tools, and you can eventually use all of them depending on the project that you’re working on. Gardening tools can often double as tools for mini-landscaping projects, too, so you’ll never regret having more tools than you need at the moment.
Table of Contents
 7 Essential Gardening Tools for Beginners
Gardening gloves
This is a no-brainer because handling plants, soil, and chemicals with your bare hands can easily turn a routine gardening day into a more challenging endeavor.
Gloves protect the skin on the hands and can also protect you from insect bites and stings from bugs in the soil. Handling some plants without gloves can also result in skin punctures and other small injuries. Why put up with the being sore after a long day of gardening if your gloves can punish you?
Purchase gloves that provide sufficient thickness and protection to the hands without hindering your hands’ ability to move. Thinner gloves are recommending when you are transplanting seedlings or handling seeds for germination.
Some gloves are water-resistant but continue to provide sufficient air circulation for the hands, so your gloves don’t get soggy inside. If you work extensively with soil and thorns, wear long gloves that go past the wrist for additional cover.
Loppers
Loppers are useful mainly for cutting thicker material in areas that aren’t easily reached by hand. If you need to ‘go the distance’ while pruning, use loppers, they have much longer handles than ordinarily sized pruners, and their blades can deal with branches up to an inch thick easily.
That’s plenty of leverage and reach for gardeners everywhere. The length of the handles can be sixteen inches to an eye-dropping thirty-six inches. Having different sizes of loppers can make general gardening and maintenance a breeze.
Garden fork
The garden fork is best used for turning garden soil. It can also make easy work of denser soil types, even when placed side by side with a spade. We recommend buying forks that have a slight curve to them.
The angle of the tines will help immensely when you are scooping up and transferring mulch or compost. A compost pile is no match for a large garden fork that has the perfect angle. A garden fork is much like the usual pitchfork in this regard.
Some garden forks have straighter tines – use this type if you are going to dig in the garden or if the soil at home is mostly compacted with lots of clay and rocks. Square-type tines have higher durability than flat-type tines. It is possible to deform flat-type tines if you dig too deeply, and the tines hit rocks and clay that is too compacted.
Pruning shears
Every gardener should have at least one pair of pruning shears. This tool is also known as secateurs, and it is used mainly for controlling leggy and out of control plants in the garden. If your garden is beginning to look like a human in ages hasn’t visited it, it is time to set your lovely pruning shears to work.
There are two kinds of pruning shears: anvil-type shears and bypass pruners. Bypass pruners work specifically like scissors, while anvil-type shears are designed to cut like knives. Use anvil pruners for dealing with quantities of deadwood in your garden. It is not good for live plants.
Bypass pruners are recommended for greenwood and when you need to prune live plants. The third type of pruner called the ratcheting pruner can be used when you need additional muscle for tougher wood. However, ratcheting pruners require much more regular maintenance and sharpening.
Hand trowel
The hand trowel is excellent for the transplantation of bedding plants. Use this for transferring herbs and other small plants. Weeds don’t stand a chance when a new hand trowel is set into motion. We recommend working with a trowel with a broader blade if you need something to move lots of soil. Narrower blades are more appropriate for digging up and removing weeds, especially if your garden has rocky soil.
No matter how broad or narrow the blade maybe, the spade’s handle should be comfortable to hold. If it’s not comfortable, you are going to have a tougher time working in your garden. As for the material, the best type of hand trowels is made from stainless steel. If you can’t get one that is 100% stainless steel, the head should at least be forged from this metal.
Spade
The humble spade is the hardest working workhorse in the garden. Spades are used mainly to punch holes into the earth and move earth a bit so you can plant pots and seedlings.
Spades are also used, removing sod and edging. High-quality spades are more expensive than the other tools we have mentioned earlier, but they are a good tool to have around because of the sheer variety of tasks you can complete.
If you can, pick a spade with thick treads on top of the blade so your boot will have a good place to grab the spade when you need more force to dig into the soil.
Hardwood handles like the ones built with ash are a good choice because they are less likely to crack from pressure and impact. And depending on your height, you can pick either a shorter spade or a taller one. Having a longer spade handle will provide more leverage when digging into the soil, but they are harder to carry and use.
Rake
Rakes are used for whisking away debris and leaves from spot to spot. You can invest in a durable rake with an adjustable handle so it can become more of a multi-tool in the garden. There are two kinds of rakes based on the material used for their tines.
Plastic-tined rakes are more appropriate for lawns with much more delicate soil, while metal rakes are adequate for soils that are rocky and strewn with lots of debris. Either will work, but metal is always more durable than plastic.
