Gardening Resource

Gardening Tools

A gardening tool is an implement that can be made use of to help you in your gardening work. Gardening tools come in a wide range and can mainly be classified as hand tools and power tools. Hand gardening tools are used by hand and will use the gardener's muscular energy while the power gardening tools will use other sources of power such as electricity or gasoline for their functioning.

Gardening tools have a long history. Spades, hoes, pitchforks etc were among some of the earliest gardening tools used by man. These were mainly wooden at the time of their invention. However, slowly when the advantages of metals came into light these tools started using more and more meal and have evolved into the modern tools that we see today.

Here is a list of some popular gardening tools:

• Spade - A thick rectangular sheet of metal attached at the end of a long handle, constitutes the spade. It is used for digging the soil and also in moving the dug-up earth.


• Garden hoe - A garden hoe is similar to a spade except for the fact that the metal plate attached at the end is at an angle to the long handle. This makes the hoe useful for agitating or mixing up the different layers of soil. It is also useful in moving and piling up soil a the base of a plant.


• Pitchfork - A pitchfork, another gardening tool with a long handle, consists of metal prongs or tines at the end of the handle. This design makes it capable of scooping up and throwing (or pitching) loose material on the ground such as dry leaves, hay etc.


• Rake - The rake is used in leveling the ground or also to push and heap scattered leaves, loose grass etc in a garden. It is nothing but a long bar with a wide array of teeth at the end such that the teeth are at right angles to the handle.


• Shears - Pruning shears are just a kind of scissors designed to be hard and sharp for specific use on plants. Another kind of shears, the grass shears, are also used to tri the lawns in a garden. These are similar to pruning shears, except for having long handles and being designed to cut more grass at time, by employing long blades placed at right angles to the handle.


• Lawn Mower - This is one of the first power tools to befriend a gardener. Used to trim the grass on a lawn, the typical lawn mower will consist of blades that rotate around an axis thus cutting all the grass above a certain height onwards.


• Leaf blower - Another power tool, this one simply blows air out of a nozzle to push away the unwanted debris such as dry leaves lying around in a garden. Some leaf blowers are also designed to suck the debris into a bag by creating a vacuum.