Well, I’m no expert, but this is what I have learned so far:
For the Allotmenteer
Enthusiasm and determination!
Decent Gardening shoes/wellies
Proper Gardening gloves
A notebook/diary and pen/pencil
A flask (for tea/water)
Starting out and standby tools
A tape measure
Garden twine/string
Bamboo sticks or other posts for marking out
Wheelbarrow or at best – a lightweight trug
Some seeds!
Essential Tools
Scissors/sharp knife/secateurs
Trowel
Spade
Dibber
Fork
Hoe (draw hoe preferrably, but dutch hoes are fine too)
Mat-hook
Rake
Watering can
Horticultural Fleece
Non-Essential but nonetheless useful
A large, air-tight, waterproof box to store your seeds
A soil sieve
Guides/books on kitchen gardening
A saw
The tools can be obtained cheaply at diy stores, or, you can buy them second hand. It is definitely worth investing in decent tools though, and perhaps with all the money saved with growing your own fruit and vegetables, you can invest in a decent spade, hoe, and fork at the very least. Watering cans with a decent rose are an essential, in my opinion. But you could use a large drinks bottle with holes pierced into the cap. It would make the task much more laborious though, because it carries far less than a watering can.
Useful items that can be recycled for use on your plot
Wooden pallets (for creating your compost heap)
Lengths of garden hose (for creating arched structures to support netting, fleece or polythene for cloches/poly tunnels.
Off-cuts of carpet underlay (to create ‘collars’ for cabbage plants and crops susceptible to cabbage root-fly).
Small plastic water bottles to place over the tops of bamboo canes to protect eyes etc.
Large drinks bottles to use as watering reservoirs or cloches.
Grass clippings and old newspapers for mulching
Vegetable peelings, used teabags, shredded paper, grass clippings and egg shells to add to your compost heap
Bricks/paving slabs/roof tiles spare from building work to create paths or to use as weights to hold down fleece/netting.
I think that’s it for now, but any suggestions are warmly welcomed. I’m still learning myself, after all.
