Garden tools are an important necessity for any type of gardening. We have tools for composting, digging, container gardening, vegetable gardening, and flower gardening, most of which are interchangeable. For instance you can use a digging tool for vegetable or flower gardening and a composting tool for digging. It is not necessary to purchase identical tools for all your different garden areas, some of the same garden tools will work quite well in many different areas.

Composting is a combination of yard, garden and landscape scraps; which is considered as the brown waste, and kitchen scraps; considered as green waste. Composting is the end result of a feeding pattern which includes hundreds of different organism, such as bacteria, fungi, worms and insects. In order to keep this process going there are a few things we need to do. One of the garden tools that is needed is called a turning post or turning tool and it is mainly for aerating the compost pile, which is an important step.

A compost fork or pitch fork is the garden tool that is needed to turn your compost pile whenever you add anything new. This is a necessary step as it mixes eveything together. If we never mixed our compost pile, the feeding pattern would not work properly.

After we gather all the kitchen scraps together in a container, one of the garden tools we may want to use is the garden scoop, this will enable us to scatter the scraps over the top of the compost pile before mixing.

Rakes, hoes, spades and shovels would be considered as digging garden tools. These garden tools can also be used for composting, vegetable and flower gardening. A trowel is a short handled garden tool used for digging small holes for planting vegetables, bulbs and flowers in the ground or in container gardening.

Hand garden tools, such as trowels, weeders, forks, and scoops are great tools for removing weeds, planting seeds and young seedlings. There is even a tool for that I consider a bulb digging tool, after the hole is dug, leave the tool in the ground and drop in the bulb. Many of these hand garden tools can also be used for vegetable gardening, flower gardening and container gardening.

When purchasing a long handled digging tool such as the rake, shovel, spade or hoe, we need to make sure the handle is the proper size for our body structure. If the handle is too short for our build, we will end up with a backache; if too long; we will struggle with it and probably give up using it. This is just a sampling of some of the garden tools needed for starting and maintaining our gardens or compost piles.