MY FAVOURITE GARDENING TOOLS

When it comes down to it, the pleasure you get from gardening partly depends on your tools. It is a delight to slice vertically through the soil to make a sharp edge if you have a nice, light, sharp spade but a dreadful chore if you have big, heavy, blunt one. Loosening a bed of soil is so easy with a good, strong fork with tines that aren't going to bend and a handle strong enough to lever on. Even carrying around a pair of secateurs in your back pocket can be difficult if your pants pockets are too shallow and if you don't have a ho-mi, I don't know how you get by at all. Here are my cannot-do-without gardening tools and why I love them.

	My bag holds all the small things I might need for any job at all, including  tools like a shifting spanner, screwdriver, heavy mallet, string, labels, watering nozzle, bits of irrigation fittings, and actual  gardening tools.
	This pen is UV resistant and will not fade so labels stay legible for years.
	Brass hose fittings like this one are a lifetime investment. I have had these particular fittings forever and they never leak or need repair, unlike every single plastic piece I have ever had.
	This was my father's sieve and I use it to sift compost for seed raising. It is ancient but so far has held together well and is very comfortable to use.
	The ho-mi....used for weeding, drilling lines for sowing, anything and everything as it is strong, well made, has a curved side and a straight side as well as a sharp point.
	My small  spade that I keep sharpened and my fork that has strong tines that never bend. They hang on nails on this post, out of the rain but close at hand every day.
	This solid metal rake has an old handle that is smooth, strong and gets thicker at the end so you can pull on it and it won't slip out of your hand.... they just don't make handles like this any more it seems... especially on wheelbarrows.
	The star dropper.... can be hammered in to almost any ground, any time of the year. Hit it as hard as you like and it will not split like wooden stakes and will never break either. I have about 40 of them and rarely is one out of use.