All good gardener has some type of gardening equipment. In fact, it抯 nearly impossible to have a garden without using gardening tools. What kind of garden tools you use will obviously depend on the size and extent of your garden, what you are able to handle, if you want to spend a lot of time in your garden or get done quickly, and finally, how much money you are willing to spend.

While most organic gardeners do not have expensive or high-tech gardening tools, all of them have some type of gardening equipment for cultivating. Tools for cultivating can include both hand held tools and power tools. What kind you buy depends on how serious of a gardener you are. Hand tools include your everyday items like shovels, spading forks, rakes, trowels, and diggers. These can all be used to get a garden ready for planting and are relatively easy to use and do not require a great deal of strength. Other tools include a wheel cultivator, pickax, and mattock.

While power tools are a little more expensive than hand tools, they can really cut down on the hard labor. The most essential power gardening tool is undoubtedly the tiller. The tiller will break up the ground and get it ready for planting, chop up any debris, and help mix in fertilizer and compost. If you don抰 want to spend the money on a tiller (or give up the health benefits double digging brings!) you can always hire someone or rent a tiller for one time use. Other power tools that are very popular include chippers, garden shredders, and chain-saws.

If you have shrubs, hedges, or small trees in your yard, pruning tools are a very necessary piece of gardening equipment. Pruning shears are good for branches about 緮 in diameter, while lopping shears help prune branches from a half inch up to about 2 inches. Pole pruners are on a pole extension and are used to reach branches up to 15 feet above ground. Hedge shears and pruning saws are both larger, more heavy duty pruning tools for the serious gardener.

Since garden plants must be watered in order to survive, and lets face it, it doesn抰 rain whenever we want it to, gardening equipment for watering is a must have. The one thing you can抰 get along without is a water hose, everything after that is optional. Often gardeners use sprinklers or s drip irrigation hose. There are even timers you can purchase for sprinklers or drip hoses, if you are willing to part with the hard earned cash those tomatoes brought in last summer.

Gardening without some sort of tools to help would surely be much harder than it needs to be. Some people truly enjoy getting some dirt under their fingernails while planting and weeding, but even those like me that do, have the most basic of gardening tools. I'd be absolutely lost without my hand trowel. Gardening equipment is a part of gardening and is as important as the seed and the soil.