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Maximize Your Outdoor Space with These 6 Essential Garden Tools

Now that spring is well underway, you’ve probably been hard at work outside getting your lawn and garden in tip-top shape for summer. Keeping your green spaces beautiful is about much more than just firing up the lawn mower; you’ll also need tools for digging, planting and weeding.

Whether you’re planting tomatoes, flowers or shrubs, or just taking care of the plants you already have, the right tool for the job will save you time, effort and backaches. Here are 6 valuable garden tools that you won’t want to do without.

• Spading Fork

A spading fork looks a little like a pitchfork, but is much more versatile. Not only can it pick up loose material like a pitchfork can, but it is also the perfect tool for turning and aerating soil and removing large weeds.

Its tines sink into the ground more easily than a spade does, which makes tasks like digging out big weeds much easier. This versatile tool will help you in your vegetable or flower garden as well as in landscaping your property.

• Shovel

A spade-type garden shovel is a must-have for any home gardener. Its flat, pointed blade makes it penetrate the ground well, and a good spade also has a flat edge at the top of the blade, where you can place your foot and push the blade into the ground.

A garden spade is perfect for digging holes to plant trees or rose bushes, for example, and for moving larger amounts of material than a spading fork can.

• Pruning Shears

Lots of people use scissors for smaller pruning jobs such as pruning flowers or vegetable plants. Not only can you end up with dirty or misplaced scissors this way; scissors just aren’t the right tool for this job.

The cutting motion of regular scissors is more suited for paper than plants, and can end up tearing the plant instead of cutting it cleanly, leaving the plant more vulnerable to disease. The snipping action of pruning shears is also more powerful than scissors, which saves your hand and makes your job easier.

Pick up this handy, inexpensive little tool for small jobs, and its larger cousin, the lopper, for bigger jobs. You’ll be glad you did!

• Garden Sprayer

Simple pump-up garden sprayers are inexpensive, easy to use, and useful for spraying anything from weed killer to fertilizer. They also come with measuring lines on the sides, which are very useful when you need to dilute a liquid or apply a specific amount of liquid to an area.

These sprayers are much easier to use than a watering can or manual sprayer, and much less messy. The contents of the sprayer will be under pressure, so be sure to follow the instructions carefully.

Also be sure to label the contents of the sprayer, and keep a separate sprayer for each task to avoid accidentally contaminating your fertilizer with weed killer.

Besides gardening uses, the pump-up sprayer is also the right tool for applying Wet & Forget Outdoor to get rid of moss, algae, lichen, mold and mildew on your outdoor surfaces.

• Trowel

Most of your planting jobs, from tomatoes to flowers, will require you to get down on the ground and work with your hands. This means that your trowel will be one of your most important gardening tools, especially in the springtime.

A good trowel with a sturdy steel blade will last a long time and make planting much easier. Many gardeners keep at least 2 trowels of different sizes for different jobs.

A trowel with a longer, narrow blade will make planting in hard soil easier, while a shorter, wider blade will move more dirt faster. When shopping for trowels, “try them on” to see which ones fit most comfortably in your hand.

• Gardening Gloves

Your most important gardening tools are your hands. Make sure you have the right gardening gloves for the job to protect your hands from splinters, cuts, bug or spider bites, bee stings and other injuries.

This handy article (pun intended) outlines the different types of gardening gloves, along with their strengths and weaknesses and which jobs they’re best suited for.

The right garden tools will make all of your gardening tasks easier and more fun. Which of your garden tools could you not stand to do without?

Learn more about Wet & Forget products!

Photos By Gmihail, DO’Neil