Tools for Gardening

Winter is the time to clean, evaluate, and update your tool collection as necessary, before you're out there and find out the handle is splitting on your hoe in the spring. The following tools are recommended as necessary by the book, Garden Steps. I would agree with most of them, and the comments below about them are my own.
1. Wheelbarrow- helps SO MUCH in hauling compost or mulch or leaves or a whole host of other things. I have a 100-year-old newspaper article indicating that a venerable old man was wheeled around the yard in one to celebrate his 90th birthday. I might not use it for people, but otherwise it is good.
2. Shovels- a square one, and a shield-shaped one with a point at the end. In a small garden where even a tiller won't fit well, you do a lot of digging. The square one is good for double-digging, the rounder one for larger transplants, like digging a round hole for a new bush.
3. Spading fork- I need one of these. They have thick, rounded tines for loosening clay soil (the South has a lot of clay). They are also good for digging potatoes and digging in soil amendments (to make that clay good for growing more than bricks).
4. A Sickle for cutting weeds around edges and cutting down cornstalks. I do not have this, either. We have a weed-eater, but I cannot start it. I tend to use clippers, but they're hard on my hands.
5. Rakes, both leaf and garden. A leaf rake is shaped like a fan, and is useful for moving light mulches on relatively smooth ground. The garden rake is flatter with tough, pointed tines used to break up clods. Do not drop this on the ground with tines up- it is bad gardening etiquette, because someone could step on the tines and get hit by the handle.
6. Hoe and cultivator- The cultivator is a tool a bit like the rake, but with longer, fewer tines. I do not have one. THE HOE IS YOUR FRIEND. You can dig out and hook the ***&@!! poison ivy without touching it. You can break up clods after a rain-and-bake incident between close plants. You can do gentle weeding with it, without disrupting the root systems of your crops. There are lots of different kinds of hoes. Choose the size and heft that works for you.
7. Trowels- Essential for transplants and the short rows you get in a tiny garden.
8. Watering pot and hose- you need both. The watering pot is good for mixing up liquid fertilizers and watering things in pots, and delicate new plants. The hose is good for your stronger plants, and filling irrigation containers. Garden Steps has some pretty creative irrigation schemes.
9. Other- iron bar or post hole diggers for setting stakes, twine (many, many yards, for marking rows, tying up plants, etc.), pitchfork (great for mulching big plants), row markers/stakes (even in beds, mark where you planted chard and where you planted beets. You'll forget if you don't mark it).
10. Grindstone- good for sharpening things. I do not have one, but my husband may among the tools in the garage.