Landscaping - Tools Needed

WHETHER your grounds are large or small, the right tools and equipment can speed routine tasks and help you to successful gardening. Taking good care of your tools and keeping them in one place will pay dividends in time and effort. If you do not have a tool house or room where you can keep all your tools, and the insecticides, fertilizers, stakes, wire, paint and other equipment a well-prepared gardener should have, arrange to make space in your garage, or build a locker in a corner of your carport or breezeway. A tool shed that is like a giant kitchen cabinet can be added lean-to fashion to your garage.

There are basic tools everybody needs. These include a metal shank spade or, better, the easier-to-handle and extremely useful spad-ing fork, and the small and handy planting shovel. Then, to carry in a handbox or basket, so you will have them when you need them, your steel shank hand trowel, hand fork and hand cultivator. An iron or bow rake is fundamental, of course, and so is the bamboo or broom rake. A weed spud for hand removal of weeds is a favorite instrument, and a good pair of shears or hand pruner is indispenable.

The other musts are your hose, Lawn mower, roller, watering can and wheelbarrow. Not as vital but very useful are an edging sickle which utilizes old razor blades; lawn edger and grass-edging shears; long-handled or pole-pruning shears, hedge shears and lopping shears. Also, a good sprinkler; a deep cultivator such as the potato hoe; a dibble for seedlings; a stapling gun; a pruning saw and soil sieves.

For your hose, a reel is good to have, and a canvas hose and a wand for soaking the soil without getting water on the leaves are valuable attachments.

The following are luxuries, perhaps, but they will help you do a professional job: a pressure sprayer, root feeder, wheel hoe and cultivator, spreader, soil-testing kit, garden tractor and garden lawn sweeper, or mechanical garden mower with mulching attachment and power rotary tiller, and, finally, an electric hotbed.