Spades, shovels hoes. forks, trowels: how to pick the best garden tools

ASK any gardener worth their salt if they have their own particular favourites when it comes to garden tools, and the answer will almost always be a resounding yes.

For some, the tool in question might be a very well-used shovel or spade, its metal tip rounded and razor-sharp from long years of regular use. For others, it’s a favourite hoe, a special hand-trowel, a much-loved rake or a weeding implement that they’ve owned forever and would now hate to be without.

These are the special tools with which the gardener has formed an affectionate bond, the dependable ones that go straight into the wheelbarrow at the beginning of a hard day’s gardening, to be used again and again. And then there are the rest of them . . .

The “rest of them” are the tools found hidden at the back of most garden sheds, festooned with cobwebs, coated in a layer of rust, their handles cracked and their blades broken. They’re the tools that never really did what they were supposed to do: the secateurs so blunt that it would barely cut so much as a blade of grass, the garden fork so flimsy that it crumpled on contact with the first large stone, the spade so short-handled that only a child could use it without getting an aching back.

Bought long ago, on impulse or in a sale, they are now heartily despised. Bitter experience and hard effort has taught their owners that there’s nothing like bad gardening tools to turn the already-arduous tasks of weeding, digging, hoeing, raking and pruning into a series of hair-pullingly tedious, tantrum-inducing chores (having a hissy fit about a broken spade/fork/shovel/hoe while ankle-deep in mud is, as some will know, a peculiarly dispiriting, undignified, experience).

In the OPW’s walled kitchen garden in the Phoenix Park, professional gardeners Meeda Downey and Brian Quinn never succumb to such hissy fits, the reason being that they’re always well-equipped when it comes to useful, long-lasting tools that get the job done with the minimum amount of fuss. Along with an armoury of rakes, spades, shovels and forks that are always kept close at hand, neither gardener is ever without either their Felco secateurs (a Swiss-made brand available from www.mrmiddleton.com and considered by many to be the best there is) or their oscillating hoes (also known as the stirrup hoe, the scuffle hoe or the swivel hoe).

The latter, which has a swivelling head that cuts both on the forward and on the backward stroke, is a particular favourite of Meeda’s, who says that she wouldn’t be without it. “I use it all the time. It’s brilliant for keeping down the weeds in the vegetable beds and the herbaceous border, you can cover a lot of ground with it, and it’s pretty good at getting into tight spaces,” she explains.

Available in three different widths (85mm, 125mm and 175mm), the oscillating hoe is also a firm favourite of many other professional gardeners, including both the Irish Timescolumnist Michael Viney and the vegetable gardening expert and author, Klaus Laitenberger, who says that he would also be lost without it (and his round hoe) when it comes to keeping down the weeds in his Leitrim garden.

For stockists, try Cork-based suppliers Fruithill Farm (www.fruithillfarm.com), The Organic Centre in Leitrim (www.theorganiccentre.ie) or some of the bigger and better garden centres.

Johnstown Garden Centre (www.johnstowngardencentre.ie) also stocks a copper alloy version of the same oscillating hoe, this time made by the Austrian firm PKS. (Fruithill Farm stocks a selection of other PKS tools, by the way, but not their oscillating hoe). Designed by Walter Schauberger and his father, the brilliant engineer, scientist and naturalist Viktor Schauberger, the PKS oscillating hoe is based on the theory that copper alloy tools are a useful means of adding very small amounts of certain trace elements to the soil, resulting in increased fertility and productivity. More information on PKS and the Schaubergers is at www.pks.or.at ).

Hoes, it should be added, are one of those tools to which you could easily devote a lengthy Wikipedia entry. Along with the aforementioned oscillating hoe, there are Dutch hoes (which you push), draw or drag hoes (which you pull), Chillington hoes/ ridging hoes, trenching hoes, onion hoes, rootaxe hoes (a heavy duty type) and colinear hoes (a particularly sharp type). And that’s only some of them.

Then there are the modified garden tools, or hybrids of traditional tools, such as the German-made Wolf Garten range of garden tools (also available from Johnstown Garden Centre). Quite a few gardeners, including organic Meath-based grower Nicky Kyle, are big fans of their Cultiweeder, a double-purpose gardening tool with a sharp hoeing blade on one side and three lance-shaped prongs or tines on the other, that can be used to break up and loosen the soil.

The spade is another tool that it’s easy to get wrong (they can be too short, too heavy, too weak or poorly balanced) as is the garden fork. The very best are made of forged steel, with light but sturdy handles made from ash or lime. Fruithill Farm do a lovely range that are made in the Black Forest region of Germany, while the Wicklow-based, online-garden centre DYG (www.dyg.ie), are the only Irish stockists of the Bulldog Irish spade, handmade in the North of England to a traditional design, with a forged steel blade, a reinforced shaft for extra strength, and a T-shaped, extra long handle.

But aside from all those mentioned above, there are also the odd garden tools, the strange tools, the once-off tools that are beautifully designed for their specific purpose, if only we still knew what that purpose is. Sometimes, you see, people forget exactly what this or that particular garden tool was designed for. Which is why you have a website like www.oldgardentools.co.uk, where some of the tools date from the 18th and 19th centuries and people really have no idea what they were once supposed to do. Hence, along with tools such as “Old Asparagus Gouge”, “Turfing Iron”, “Flower Picker” and “Grape Storage Jar”, there’s a whole section of the site entitled “The Old Garden Tools Quiz”, where you’re invited to e-mail the site-owners with suggestions as to what they were once used for.

• The OPW's Victorian walled kitchen garden is in the grounds of the Phoenix Park Visitor Centre, beside the Phoenix Park Café and Ashtown Castle. The gardens are open daily 10am-4pm.

• Next week Urban Farmer in Property will showing how to grow potatoes in a polytunnel

• Fionnuala Fallon is a garden designer and writer