Essential Equipment for a Gardener

Whether your grounds are large or small, the right tools and equipment can speed routine tasks and help you to successful gardening. Taking good care of your tools and keeping them in one place will pay dividends in time and effort.

If you do not have a tool house or room where you can keep all your tools, and the insecticides, fertilizers, stakes, wire, paint and other equipment a well-prepared gardener should have, arrange to make space in your garage, or build a locker in a corner of your carport or breezeway. A tool shed that is like a giant kitchen cabinet can be added lean-to fashion to your garage.

There are basic tools everybody needs. These include a metal shank spade or, better, the easier-to-handle and extremely useful spading fork, and the small and handy planting shovel. Then, to carry in a hand box or basket, so you will have them when you need them, your steel shank hand trowel, hand fork and hand cultivator. An iron or bow rake is fundamental, of course, and so is the bamboo or broom rake. A weed spud for hand removal of weeds is a favourite instrument, and a good pair of shears or a hand pruner is indispensable. The other musts are your hose, hand mower, roller, watering can and wheelbarrow.

Not as vital but very useful are an edging sickle which utilizes old razor blades; lawn edger and grass-edging shears; long-handled or pole-pruning shears, hedge shears and lopping shears. Also, a good sprinkler; a deep cultivator such as the potato hoe; a dibble for seedlings; a stapling gun; a pruning saw and soil sieves. For your hose, a reel is good to have, and a canvas hose and into small fragments and deposited beneath or to one side of the machine, where they sift down among the grass leaves and form a light, protective mulch layer. This decomposes after a while and adds to the organic fertility of the lawn.

Other equipment to have on hand that will keep you from running to the store just when you want to be out working on the grounds, includes: plant ties, stakes, labels; burlap or canvas, chicken wire, garden line; a yardstick and a measuring cup and spoons; creosote and other needed paints and a paintbrush; sand, peat moss, lime, plant foods and insecticides and other a wand for soaking the soil without getting water on the leaves are valuable attachments.

The following are luxuries, perhaps, but they will help you do a professional job: a pressure sprayer, root feeder, wheel hoe and cultivator, spreader, soil-testing kit, garden tractor and garden lawn sweeper, or mechanical garden mower with mulching attachment and power rotary tiller, and, finally, an electric hotbed.

The mechanical, or power, machines are bringing about changes in gardening. The mower and mulcher, for example, suggests a new way to gather fall leaves and use them for mulching. You run it over the lawn in the usual way. The leaves are cut chemicals and, finally, pots and flats.