Essential Gardening Tools

I'm Doug Smiddy of Smiddy's Gardening Services here on behalf of expertvillage.com and welcome to my garden. Today we're here to talk about low maintenance gardening. Hi, we're back in our low maintenance garden. Now, it's a low maintenance garden not a no maintenance garden, so we have to do a little work and to do some of that work you're going to have to get a few simple tools real easy to use. A great tool that I probably use the most of all them is what I call a garden fork. It looks like this about four times, go out to your local garden center. To me it's worth spending a few extra dollars for a high quality tool with a good heavy duty handle cause you're going to be working this thing a lot and you don't want it to break. So they're really quiet simple when you just place it into the soil, work it down and you can just work your soil just like that, really really effective tool. Another thing you're going to need is a good old standard digging shovel with a head like that on it. If you're going to be planting a started plant you want to dig a nice deep hole. You can just put this right in the ground, put a little foot pressure on it, dig your hole. Indispensable tool to have along with your digging fork. Now, you're going to have to get to the sad subject of weening. There's a couple of different ways to do that, we'll discuss weening in details later. But one of the tools that I like to use is a little hand held cultivator and what you can do with this is dig down into the soil and loosing up those roots. It's really good for loosing up small areas, has a very similar effect to the garden fork. You can loosen up the root and the weeds and just pull them out, quiet simply great tool to have I highly recommend you make the investment. If your back kind of bothers you sometimes like mine does, you may want to consider investing in a longer handle one which is really on the head end it's the same tool. You got this real nice long handle and you can reach out and just stir up the soil, again for weeding or scratching in fertilizers or any soil amendments. Another indispensable tool is the good old fashion garden rake. This is great for evening out your soil, you can use both sides of this actually. This is really good for stirring up the soil, loosening up the top few inches if you just put down a large amount of fertilizer let's say and you want to scratch into the soil like that. You can use the back side of it and drag this right across your soil to level things out, another indispensable tool to have. A pair of clippers, for instance you want to prune your tomato plants a little bit. Put these right in your back pocket and come clip them. Another good indispensable tool is your good old hand held trowel. It's great for digging little holes, wood handle pretty comfortable. Pretty much that's all you're going to need in your low maintenance garden, so it's not going to be a huge investment and again spend a couple extra dollars and get the quality stuff otherwise you're going to be buying a cheaper one twice, why waste your money so you get what you paid for.