With the gardening season in full swing now, the garden storage shed gets used a lot to store gardening tools. Some use a tool shed for this, some use their garden shed, and some might just have enough with an outdoor garden storage box. The kind of shed is not that important. It mainly just serves to keep the tools dry and thus prevent rust, and keep them save.

For some tools in the tool shed like sharp knives or pruners it might be good to keep them safely locked away in a lockable garden storage shed or summerhouse when younger children are around, for some tools it might be good to be safely locked away during night time or during holidays when the homeowners are absent to not be misused by petty criminals as tools to break into the house.
So if you use a tool shed, a garden storage shed or an outdoor storage box for your gardening tools, the most important  things are that the tools are dry and can be safely locked out of reach of any unauthorized access.

In the following article, we want to mention some important and practical gardening tools that professional gardeners keep in their garden storage sheds.

The most popular gardening tools for your garden storage shed

Of course the selection of gardening tools in each individual garden storage shed is different as every gardener has his or her own style, selection of plants, different soils and different tasks. So for example, if you have a walkway leading to your summerhouse plastered with heavy natural paving slabs, you might have a tool called cobra head and a pair of knee pads in your tool shed to remove weeds from between the slabs. Or maybe you prefer a cobra head with a long handle for that.

However, kneeling pads, gloves, aprons, hats: The list of gardening accessories is long, and they won’t be on our list that will focus on “real” tools.

So let’s start our little compilation with a relatively new tool that has conquered the professional gardening world very quickly:

The Japanese Gardening Knife (Hori hori)

When I think of how many cheap garden trowels I have broken during my career as a gardener, I would probably end up at a double-digit number. They might be sufficiently sharp to push them into the ground, but when it comes to levering some weed out, only the very best qualities survive.

I do not yet have a hori hori in my garden storage shed, but it is definitively on my list after I have done my research about it. A massive, sturdy, double-edged, seven inches, high-grade steel blade with a wooden handle can be used for digging, planting, and weeding. Many have a saw blade on one side that is sharp enough to cut small perennials. Some have a measure engraved on which you can see how many inches deep the blade is in the soil which can be practical when following manuals that advise about depth of seeding or planting. Pointy, with two sharp blades, it can easily be pushed deep into the earth, cutting roots, and even if you wanted, you would not be able to break it levering out some large deep-rooted weeds.

A quality tool that will be found in many more tool sheds in the near future.

In many garden storage sheds the digging fork has taken the spade’s spot

The spade always used to have a place in the front row in every garden storage shed when it was still common to dig over beds in spring to prepare them for the first crops.

Nowadays with organic gardening and near-natural horticulture, many gardeners strive to maintain a natural layering in the soil with a layer of mulch over a layer of raw compost over a layer of mature compost on humous soil. Other than with the spade, which turns the layers upside down, the digging fork can be used for digging over but also for just loosen up the soil by sticking it into the ground and levering the soil up a bit. Proceeding from front to back so that you lever the hard soil into the direction of the already loosened soil, you can treat large areas easier than digging them over. Weeds can then be torn out with their roots relatively easily from the loosened earth.

Of course, the spade will keep its place in the most garden storage sheds, because it still is useful to dig trenches or holes to plant trees in, to dig out trees or shrubs for replanting while easily cutting through the roots.

To get a digging fork that is up to the task and will stay in your tool shed for more than just a year, you have to invest in a good quality, though. Metal shafts reaching up protecting the handle will be useful and you might consider purchasing a really solid model maybe hand-forged, and hardened. Some models with blade-like teeth or with two handles specialized on this levering, loosening soil cultivation are also already on the market.

A follow-up on soil loosened by the digging fork can be done with a usual fork hoe. This hoe has its blades in a right angle to the handle and can be used for further loosening the chunks left over by the digging fork.

A hand rake belongs into every garden storage shed

A garden storage shed simply would not be complete without it. The hand rake can be used to gather foliage in autumn or grass clippings after the lawn mower has done its duty. Grass clippings could be a whole other topic when it comes to early mulching material. Some organic gardeners are happily taking their neighbours grass clippings because they constitute such a fine mulching material rich in nitrates and so many other plant nutrients. But the hand rake is also fetched out of the tool shed when it comes to sowing out. To sow fine seeds, like for example carrots, sesame or basil, you need a fine crumbled and even seed-bed, and the hand rake is the right tool to prepare it.

So many other tools, of course, belong into a gardener’s tool shed or storage box, like scissors, knifes, secateurs, a dibber, a hand weeder, a heavy hoe and the wheelbarrow. A garden hose and a watering can and so many more that we simply can not describe them all here.

And still most gardeners would have gardening tools in their garden storage sheds that we have not mentioned yet. The tool set in your garden storage shed is as individual as your garden is and most gardener’s specific way of gardening requires an individual set.