Gardening season is upon us and Barebones Australia is stocked up on our most popular gardening products and tools. The Barebones Gardening collection features a variety of multi-purpose tools that help you accomplish tasks in a much more efficient way. We've put together a Barebones Gardening Tool Buying Guide to help gardening beginners and experts alike get the most out of your new gardening tools.
Hori Hori With Sheath
The Hori Hori is the perfect instrument for any avid gardener. For starters, it’s a serrated blade that cuts open bags. It features a hook to cut twine and open bottles. The sharp blade point will will effortlessly cut through tough materials and dirt. It’s pretty handy in everyday gardening situations where one has to unearth plants without damaging their roots when transplanting. The measurement markings on the handle are ideal for digging a hole at the right depth for planting your vegetables as well as uprooting weeds in those tight spaces where other tools have trouble reaching them without damaging the surrounding roots!
Garden Trowel
Trowels are incredibly handy for digging in small spaces. The narrow, slightly scooped blade is perfect for installing bedding plants, moving soil, and digging holes for seedlings. A trowel is an essential tool in every gardener's arsenal.
Square Hoe
The Barebones Square Hoe will quickly become one of the most used tools in your kit. It’s a wonderful trencher, hiller, and soil-patter. Use the square hoe to dig a long trench where seeds or transplants will be planted in a row like fashion. Hill up the soil over the seeds or around the seedlings roots. Then use the flat side of the hoe to gently pat the soil down around the plant so the seeds and roots are stabilized. Potato plants need to be continuously covered by a hill of soil throughout the season. When tending to potato crops, use the edge of the hoe to scoop and hill soil in a mound over the plant. The square hoe is a wonderful tool for moving soil in order to maintain garden bed borders and rows.
Triangle Hoe
Just like a square hoe, the triangle hoe has a variety of uses for all types of gardeners. This is a great tool to turn to when you need to do precision planting and weeding. The sharp points make it ideal for sowing seeds in small narrow trenches close to each other. They are also excellent at uprooting stubborn weeds and patches of grass growing in beds. The triangle shape is ideal when working in tight spaces where you don’t want to disturb the soil or roots of nearby plants.
Cultivator
Think of a cultivator as a stronger alternative to using fingers when you get the urge to rake, stir, and mix the soil with your hands. The prongs are ideal for stirring in fertilizer and compost, raking rocky soil to remove weeds, or raking soil and mulch smooth over the surface. In parts of the garden where soil is dense and clay-like, use the cultivator to aerate the soil by pushing the points of the prongs as deep as you can before adding compost to amend the soil.
Japanese Weeding Hoe
A weeding hoe is a less known gardening implement, but after a few uses it quickly holds a special place in one’s garden tool kit. Multiple times throughout the year, garden beds can get covered in a layer of wind-blown seeds that sprout up all at once and form a green carpet of tiny weed seedlings. This can be incredibly tedious and discouraging if each weed must be picked by hand.
The razor sharp edge slides under the first inch of the soil and slices small weeds at root level with ease. A single pass with the blade uproots and severs instantly. Additionally, the blade can be sharpened. This enables it to also be used as a scythe when cutting handfuls of lavender stems and tall grasses.
Dandelion Weeding Fork
The strong taproots of dandelions and similarly growing plants are famously stubborn. The notched blade of the weeding fork is made to penetrate the soil and leverage up tap roots with ease. This tool is a life saver when dealing with strong plants whether you’re removing them from unwanted places in lawns or foraging in the wild for the medicinal roots.
Garden Scoop
Every gardener needs a lovely little scoop shovel like this. It’s perfect for scooping soil into potted plants and moving fertilizer from the bag into the soil. A nice deep scoop delivers the right amount of material (and keeps soil and fertilizer from spilling everywhere).
Pruners provide scissor-like cutting for tender green-tissued stems such as flower stalks. These also perform well on denser woody-tissued stems such as rosemary, lavender, and sage. They cut clean and close without crushing plant tissue, which helps prevent disease from infesting damaged areas after a fresh pruning.
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