- Good day. I'm Mark
from Self Sufficient Me. And in this video, I'm going to give you my top 20 best garden tools that I always use. When I say tools, what I mean by that is anything that isn't organic. For example, fertilizer is not a tool, in this case because it's organic, but a hammer could be. One last point, this
video isn't sponsored, but where I do have an affiliation
with a tool on the list, I'll let you know about it. Let's get into it. (peaceful music) Number one, hammer or mini sledgie or mini
sledgehammer to be precise. Use it to (banging sound) hammer star pickets in
like this fellow here. (banging sound) A larger sledgehammer is fine with a long handle and a heavier head, but they're harder to use. And a small hammer, well, I don't have the power to drive down if you want to stake out a large tree or something like that. I've even knocked out stumps with this. I'll tell you what, I've left this lie in the rain. I've lost it before in the banana trees and found it three months later. I nearly ran over it in the lawnmower. I've had it for about 20 years,
only a small, short handle, 30 centimeters max, but gives maximum power for
such a great little tool. Number two, I star picket remover. This stake has done its job. This tree was leaning right
over and I was able to stake it, straighten it out, and now it's growing upright
the way it should be. But trying to get this fellow out by hand by wiggling it backwards and forwards like probably I used
to do in the old days, that only gives you a hernia. You put it at the base of the star picket. It's got a little head on it there and it will grip onto the star picket, (cranking noise) and you can pull it out. Could you imagine trying to pull this out by hand? I mean, that would be
pretty much impossible. You'd have to maybe even dig it out and then you could cause
damage to the roots. Number three is this retractable
hose roll from Hose Link. If you watch my videos quite a bit, you'd know that I'm an avid hand waterer. I just like it. I have got a sprinkler
system, but I rarely use it because I prefer to get around
my plants, water by hand. It relaxes me, de-stresses me, and I can see what's
happening with my garden. I've had a heap of different
retractable hose rolls in the past, the cheapy ones,
even more expensive ones, and they've never lasted. But this fellow here, well,
now we've got two of them. I actually got this one from
Hose Link. They gave it to me. And then I purchased a separate one to put in our front yard. That's how much I loved its performance. This does what a retractable
hose roll is supposed to do. It pulls out to a
distance when you need to. This is 30 meters. I've tacked on probably an
extra 10 or 15 onto this hose to make it even longer. Cause I like going for long garden walks. And when I'm finished watering, it retracts away nice
and neatly and easily. No stoppages, no problems. And that's all I ask from
a retractable hose reel. These Hose Link connections
are unique and strong. They don't click on and off. They twist on and off, which
makes them really strong, and aren't able to pull out
like the click on ones can and then they go everywhere. How often have you had bust offs when you're trying to water the garden and a big stream of water
hits you in the face? Well it doesn't happen
with this fellow here. This is an Australian invention. If you follow the link that
I'll put in the description and also the comments section
below, I'll pin it to the top, you'll get 10% off, not just a hose reel, if you decided to buy that, but 10% off anything
in their online store, no matter where you are. If you're in the US or Australia,
it'll pick up that website and give you that discount on checkout. I get a small kickback, of course. The main deal is for you guys. Number four is the good old ET. Not the movie or the extra terrestrial. This is an army entrenching tool. I wish I had a dollar for every pit that I dug in the military. Would've paid my mortgage off by now. Just imagine digging a
six-foot pit with this fellow. No wonder my forearms are so big, but I really do rate it. As you can see, you've got the two sides. You've got the shovel side, which I use like a hoe, like a mini hoe. And then you've got this pick
side, which is handy for, you know, doing a drill
or picking out a plant or heavy weeds or anything like that. They are so sturdy. The problem is they're not easy to find. The only places I've found them, apart from joining the military. And I wouldn't recommend that, to join the military
just to get one of these, and then get out and take it with you. That's pretty extreme. What I would recommend is that you go to an army disposal store. The US, Australia, many
armies around the world have this type of tool. They're all slightly different, but they're all good quality. Number five is a mulch fork. One of these fellows here are so handy when you're moving mulch, things like wood chip, especially. If you try to use a shovel or
a spade to pick up wood chip, especially if it's been sitting
around for quite a while and it's settled, you'll just run into almost a brick wall. But with one of these mulch forks, well, you can just dig it in, get a whole heap of a scoop and put it where you need to put it. Number six is this humble scissors, a good quality scissors, mind you, something that, you know,
you can use in the kitchen. But I don't. I use this in the garden. I have it hanging up inside the shed door because I use it so often. I use it for cutting twine,
but also light pruning, so tomato plants or vegetables
that just need a light prune. I even use it when I'm
harvesting, say lettuce or peas. This is probably something
I'm using every day in the garden. Number seven is secateurs. I've had these now for a million years. You can see they're a
bit shoddy and rusty. I've abused them. No real gardener can do
without a set of secateurs. When you're trying to prune
fruit trees or even ornamentals, or even if you want to just
harvest the base of a cabbage, or a broccoli, or harvest a cauliflower, something like this is perfect. I'd much rather use other
tools when I'm pruning very large branches or even
ones that are an inch thick. So I'm happy with this size
secateur for my garden use. Number eight is this suite of Prong tools. You've got the Long
Prong, the Son of Prong, the General Prong, the Lady Prong, which is exactly the
same as the General Prong except it's pink. And then you've got the Weeder Prong. These, I can tell you, are hell-strong, and I use them all the time in our garden. I've known Peter, the guy
who invented these tools, for a few years now. And he's from my hometown of Toowoomba, I have got a deal done with
him, an affiliate-type deal, whereby again, you benefit. Go to the website Garden Tools Now. You'll get 7.5% off the purchase price. Deal or no deal, I
highly rate these tools. I've really put them through their paces, and even Nina is using them in the garden. And they're good for lifting
rocks or getting out stumps, or just even loosening the ground up. Number nine is a drying rack, or you can use it to wash vegetables. This here I've made out of a
couple of carpenter horses. Joined a couple of them together, put a couple of planks of
wood across, nailed them on. And then some, well underneath, some galvanized mesh. We use this for washing
vegetables like potatoes, even beetroot or whatever. Or, you can also use it to dry onions. Put it away in the shed,
and then pull it out, unfold it when you need it. Number 10 is another old army tool. This is a machete. And there's a good reason
why they issue every soldier one of these fellows. It's because they're so handy to use. Not to fight with, but
to chop through jungle, to whittle away at something, to make a garden stake, to
cut through a banana tree. There's so many things
that I use a machete for. And make sure you get a good quality one. You don't want something
that's going to break when you're trying to
smash through things, because that could be dangerous. You want something that can
hold a good edge as well and have good quality steel,
as well as a good handle. Number 11 is a garden cart. It's often overlooked in the backyard because yeah, people use
a wheelbarrow of course. But this thing here holds more than that, but it's just nice and easy
to be able to drag around, put prunings in, put firewood in. In this case, it's got half
a ton of bricks and rocks that I needed to move from
another part of the garden I've just left sitting here. I have abused this thing
no end. I can tell you. The brand is Blue Hawk. I can easily undo these
clamps, fold a side down. Often, this piece of kit
is easier to pull around with the four tires, than it is to say, lift and push around a heavy wheelbarrow. Number 12 is a mattock. Now I was talking about
my army entrenching tool and how I dug holes with that thing. This is much better and easier, but you just can't carry this on your back when you're a soldier and
walk around the armors. It's much easier to dig
down when you've got a nice, heavy mattock. If you get to harder ground
you can always turn it around and use the pick side of things. My grandfather was an opal miner, and I often think of him
when I'm using this tool because he would use a
mattock in the opal mines, down a shaft, and he'd chip
away at that black patch, and hopefully find that
elusive black opal, and all make us millionaires. That never happened of course, but it would have been nice if it did. Number 13 is a shovel or a spade. I know technically
they're different shapes, but at the end of the day, they're both things you kind of dig with. If you're doing close quarter work like a garden bed, for
example, something like this, something where you
don't need a long handle and you don't need to bend over so much, you just want more control,
well this is for you. If you want something a little bit bigger, you've got different sizes. Then you've got this long handle
one that I also love using. And I probably use this
more than anything. It's just easier because
of the long handle. If you have to dig down and
break through some solid ground, well then a spade is your friend. Something with a nice, sharp, pointy edge, and a good strong base so that you can stand on and push down. Number 14 is the old garden fork. Where would we be
without this fellow here? Like most of my tools, this has been battered and
bruised, sunburned, abused, but still going strong and
I'm not going to change it. See how bent that is. You can't basically dig
potatoes without one of these. I mean, you could try it with your hands. If you've got them in ground or in a large garden bed
like these potatoes here, in about three months time, I'll be just digging them out. Invaluable tool in the garden. Still, no one's really come
up with anything better. And how could you? The old garden fork. Number 15 is rake. (cockatoos squawking) Now the cockatoos have just come over. So this might be a little
bit loud and entertaining. What can you do? This is Australia. Be here all day if I have to
stop for every animal that (cockatoos continue squawking) come past and screamed at me. So rake's important in the home garden. I know you all know that. But I've got several different varieties. And the reason why I've got four at least is because they're different sizes. And I use them for different roles. If I'm raking up a whole
heap of debris, well, I'll use a larger type of rake. If I'm doing a small job,
say in the chicken pen, or raking maybe around a small fruit tree, I'll use a small-headed rake. And if I'm just trying to
loosen up some top soil around some veggie plants, just so that the water permeates
through a little better, you can use one of these
sort of de-thatching rakes, which are quite handy. They're good for getting rid
of weed seedlings as well, just raking around larger
vegetable plants in the garden. You know what I mean? Creating a garden bed and
you're just leveling out, raking leaves, whatever. A rake is obviously something that every gardener should have. Number 16 is a fold-up table. Kind of not a tool, but
it's not organic either. So it's within the rules that I set up at the start of this video. But one of these fellows is so
handy to have in the garden. You need a good quality one. I just like having it out in the garden when I'm doing some puttering around while I'm arranging plants, or I just want something
to rest on, some tools, so that I'm not bending down all the time. It really is a good, handy piece of kit and a good tool in the garden. Number 17 is a wheelbarrow. And of course, most
gardeners have one of these. This fellow here is a bit
long in the teeth as well. Plenty of holes in the base, but I'm not going to get rid of it until the guts fall completely out of it. Cause why replace something
that you're just going to bash around with soil and rocks anyway. You might as well let this thing go for as long as it possibly can. And the reason this has
lasted so long is because it is good quality. And that's what I would recommend. You want to get a nice,
deep, large wheelbarrow. No use having a small,
flimsy aluminum one. You don't want to be
doing 1,000 loads of soil when you can be doing it in 500. And the other thing is, with a wheelbarrow you want a large tire with lots of surface area, so it can get over the
grass, through boggy places. And if that means paying a fair bit extra, I recommend you do that. Number 18 is a box cutter. I need one of these so that I can open all those boxes of tools
that my sponsors send me. I wish. I use them all the time for tasks, like especially opening
up bags like potting mix. They reckon that you can untwist these and then the bag just opens up. But I've never been able to get
the hang of how you do that. So the easiest and fastest way for me is just to use one of these knives. And (bag ripping) there you go, like that. But be very careful, because cut it the wrong way and miss and, (makes slashing noise). They are very sharp. I use them for cutting out
bits of plastic bottles. Sometimes it's easier to
cut some twine with this rather than a scissors, because the scissors can
sometimes bend it over, especially any thick rope that you'd need for tying trees or tying
things up around the place. Number 19 is a handsaw. Now, like all my tools, these
get a heck of a lot of use, so they don't look the tidiest, and I'm not the best at
looking after my tools, sadly. But at the end of the day,
these curved ones are great. So are these types. They're
fairly cheap to buy. They last quite a while. Well, these are years and years old. I'm still using this one, even though the handle's broken on it. So if you've got a job that's a little too big for secateurs, but it's not worth breaking
out the power tools for, these handsaws are good value. Check this contraption out. This is an old saw that
had broken at the handle, and I just simply bolted
it onto a piece of wood to give it that extension. Works a treat and saved
me quite a few bucks getting one of those extender pole saws. I'm trying to get to 20. And I'll tell you what, it
has been madness around here. Besides the cockatoos,
the birds, the animals, now I've got a tractor down the back there at the strawberry farm, picking those awful strawberries. Cause they always pick
them not quite ripe. They're just red, but not
ripe. You know what I mean? Grow your own strawberries at home. They're much better and tastier. And now I've got my
neighbor, God bless him. Nice guy. But he's hiking
up his watering system from his dam, and you can hear that in the background. So I'm just going to have
to finish this segment off, number 20, with all this
noise going on around us. And speaking of the devil
or a devil of a situation, these are devil stakes. And it's another throwback to
my army days, unfortunately, or sorry for you guys. These are so good. They've got a devil-like tail on them where you can stick them into the ground by just stepping on them. And what we used these for in the army, was to put tack signs in to
know where everything was. So in the bush, you're
not quite sure who's who cause there's no big signs saying that the mess is over there or that the RAM-U guys are over there, or the OC is over there. What I like about these,
besides being very robust, is they've got this square top on them. And that makes it easy to tie things off. So you can stake them next
to a small vegetable plant, like a tomato, a dwarf
tomato, for example, and you can tie it up and you can use twine off several angles. You can even lean a plant against it. And I've got several examples in our own garden where
I'm doing that right now. Plus, it's this devil-type stake that makes it so easy
to put into the ground. If you can find some good,
solid ones like this, I would recommend you get them because they are really good to use for so many different things, sticking netting in for
chickens or whatever. But yeah, very good stakes. I'm fully aware that there are many other garden tools out there. Some very obvious that I
didn't mention in my top 20, this being one of them, a hoe, simply because I don't use it in my garden very often or regularly, and that was part of the
criteria, but you might. So if you have other tools
that you use in the garden that weren't mentioned in my top 20, please write them down in
the comment section below so that we can all see,
read, learn from them. And I'm just curious to
see how many I've missed or is there some other obvious ones that I might even like to
get for my tool collection. Cause you can always
have more garden tools. It was a fairly long video, I know, but I really wanted to do 20 because if I tried to do 10 top tools, well then I was going to run into trouble of which ones do you choose? And I found that the 20 gave me just about every main garden
tool that I used regularly of the non-powered type. Well, if you enjoyed this video, make sure that you use these tools, which I probably should've
mentioned in the video, hands are probably the
best tools you've got. Use these tools to curl up
and give me a big thumbs up. Click that thumbs up button. Thanks a lot for watching. Make sure you subscribe to the channel, and sharing my videos around is probably one of the best ways you
can help a channel out here on YouTube. Thanks all for watching. Bye for now.
20 Best Garden Tools by Self Sufficient Me