The tools you will need depends on the kind of gardening you want to do. My basic gardening tools are a rototiller, a shovel, and a hoe. The tiller is used to prepare the garden bed for planting, the shovel to dig holes for the tomato plants and such, and the hoe to weed the garden. I used to have a scuffle hoe, but didn't see any big advantage over the regular hoe, and it broke. A little garden could just be spaded up with a shovel. For a bigger one you might want a garden tractor.

I have most of the tools but my favorite is a potato hoe, it can dig, turn soil, hoe, dig tators, what else do you need ? :) What ever you get, buy a quality item and then 'take care' of it, and it will last a long time.......

Like Harold, my rototiller does the heavy work. Mine is a Merry Tiller. I use a flat bottom shovel for moving small amounts of soil to make our garden less unlevel. And I use a mounding hoe for basic weed chopping and for "mounding" informal raised beds without wooden retainers. I use a lopping pruner to harvest stubborn prickly things like eggplants and squash. I use a bow rake to level and prepare seedbeds. I use a post hole digger to dig holes to transplant seedlings into. I use a rock rake to remove smaller rocks from the soil.

MM

It's sometimes nice to have a hand tool with you for the small finer things. I like the Japanese Hari knife. It digs almost like a hand trowel but not quite as efficient. However it is much more efficient at getting into the ground. Additionally, it has a serated cutting edge that is very useful. The two things I carry on my belt are hand pruners and the knife. I can dig and cut most things. If I have to do something larger I get the larger tool. Another tool I like is an aspargus knife. It does well on my asparagus and it also is nice at getting tap roots of dandelions and other deep rooted weeds.

Point is, there are gobs of tools available. Each will have things it does well. You'll first need to decide what type of gardening you will be doing. But you pretty much can't go wrong with a spade or shovel, hoe, hand trowel, pruners, loppers and garden saw. Garden saw in case you need to cut dead wood, otherwise not of much use.

garden tractor to pull cart, disc, cultivator, and anything else i need.

lawn tractor to pull sprayer. my garden is 100x100 and i spray around the edges with roundup to keep the weeds down.

4 or 5 shovels, several hoes, various hand sized digging tools for planting the smaller seeds and seedlings.

8 pound hammer for driving tomato plant stakes.

somewhere in teh neighborhood of 400 ft of garden hose and a bunch of sprinklers. i am slowly changing over to soaker hoses, the areas i use them seem to do much better than the areas with sprinklers and the weeds don't shoot up as bad in the area between the rows.

my best tool of all though is a 2 year old daughter. she cn pick and shell beans quicker than either my or i can. the only problem is sometimes she shells them and throws them out on teh ground. i had a row of beans come up late last summer, right in teh path from teh garden to the house!!

davidandkasie,

Depending on your set up, you may want to consider drip irrigation. A little more expensive to set up but very efficient and more durable than soaker hose. Soakers seem to last about ~2 seasons. If you put them under light mulch they do better. With the drip systems you can even get fertilizer injection systems. 100x100 is a very nice size garden. More than most would want to handle.

yeah, it is almost too large. i got behind on it last year when my grandmother was in the hospital, and lost a good bit.

my FIL has been trying to get me to go to drip, but i haven't made the move yet. i am thinking tha twhen i do i will work it in stages so my wife does not have my head for spending so much on the garden.

the 1st year we had the house, i got the seeds for free, but between buying a tiller, hoses, and other misc stuff i spent about a grand to get a freezer full of veggies.

the 2nd year i bought the GT and attachments, plus more hoses, spent close to 100 bucks on seed, and then lime and fertilizer, so my 2nd year total was closer to 2500 with LESS veggies!

if i spend a penny this year she will kill me.

Ouch! Pray you don't move to a house with a smaller lot :). It sounds like you are about done on your tool purchases, especially big ticket items.

Stages is a good idea for drip when starting out. There are some different parts that later I found better solutions for or did not use. Corn benefits greatly from the drip. Or if you have something else that would benefit from measured watering and will be in the same configuration year to year. After you get into drip, you'll start thinking of timers and eventually move into ground moisture detection. You can easily spend thousands on the things. I ended up with a simple timer that I would have to turn on manually. It was way better than anything else I was doing and less overall hassle than the full blown set. For a 20'x50' garden it ran me about $200-300. The hard part was designing the layout so that I could isolate the section water requirements and allow for changing layouts year to year.

You probably get a kick out of using all the things you bought. I hope you have a trimmer, blower and chainsaw. Some other tools I enjoy using that can cost some. I'd like to have a chipper but I just can't justify the cost for my yard.

Good luck with it!