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This is a lightweight and durable garden spade capable of instantly digging deep holes to replant shrubs and wrap around your garden beds. Read more
Best Garden Tool For Digging Up Roots
This lightweight and portable shovel folds up small, making it the perfect tool to bring along on extended camping or hiking trips. Read more
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Cobalt’s all-steel garden tumbler is a high-quality, value-packed all-rounder that’s durable enough to handle any job you throw at it. Read more
A popular choice for digging in the garden, this spade has a serrated edge that can easily cut through small roots. Read more
This rubber-handled garden shovel is comfortable to use for long periods of time and specializes in digging and moving dirt. Read more
If you have a yard to tend to, a good shovel is a must. But with so many of all shapes and sizes, which type of shovel is best? A spade is a medium-sized shovel that is versatile enough for many jobs around the home. They usually have long, narrow blades, are about four feet long, and are great for gardening, especially because they are designed specifically for digging holes to plant established seedlings and shrubs. Shovels are also great for digging trenches and edging along garden beds.
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We spent a few weeks looking at the best-selling garden shovels to examine their durability, performance and above all their multi-tasking versatility. The best shovel we looked at is the Fiskars Steel D-Handle Garden Spade (available on Amazon) because it’s durable yet lightweight with a blade that can handle many different projects, from edging to moving dirt to digging. For something more portable, try the Gerber E-tool Folding Spade (available on Amazon). Finally, we found that there are many other great shovels on the market to choose from.
The recommendations in this guide are based on thorough product and market research by our expert team of product reviewers. These selections are based on reviewed user reviews, product specifications and, in some limited cases, our experience with the specific products named.
When it comes to overall performance, the Fiskars D Handle Garden Shovel is the best shovel you can buy right now. The shovel has a slight ergonomic curve in the handle near the blade, which is more comfortable to hold than other garden shovels in our guide. It’s a subtle twist, but it makes shoveling from different angles much easier than straight shaft shovels.
The Fiskars glass also has a relatively low weight. Despite the durable metal shaft, the Fiskar is significantly lighter than shovels of comparable size. The shaft is strong even when bumping into rocks and roots, and the tip of the blade remains intact.
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The Fiskar garden spade makes digging holes quick and easy, with a sharp blade that cuts straight through the top layer of dirt and deep into the roots. The long handle gives it enough power to work around rocks this way. The extra-wide D handle is comfortable to hold and control the shovel with, and the boot toe tread on the blade helps keep your feet in place as you push.
It edges well, digs a lot and can move a lot of dirt for a garden shovel. As one of the lowest costs we tested, you’ll be hard-pressed to find anything better for less.
The Gerber E-Tool Folding Spade is lightweight and portable for use in the garden, at the beach or on camping trips.
The Gerber E-Tool Folding Spade is in a class of its own when it comes to the other shovels on this list. This is a collapsible, portable shovel designed to fit easily into your trunk on a camping trip or into a pack while hiking. Opens to about 2 feet long for digging and collapses to just under 10 inches long for storage.
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We were worried that the folding shovel wouldn’t be strong enough to break through packed dirt, but that worry was completely unfounded. This is a super strong, durable shovel capable of digging holes through soil full of roots and rocks with little trouble. At only 2 meters long, the size of the holes is limited and you have to bend quite far to dig, which can be difficult on the back. However, for camping or beach trips, this garden shovel is a solid option.
One of the other useful features of the shovel is the serrated edge. This helps to cut roots while digging, but can also be used with the tip like a more traditional saw. We are able to cut inch thick branches with the serrated side, so the shovel can be used as a tool to help clear an area for a campsite or to gather kindling.
If you’re looking for a versatile camping tool, the Gerber E-Tool Folding Spade is a solid choice.
The Cobalt Garden Spade is one of the top performers in our testing. With a flat, versatile blade that’s equally good at cutting and moving dirt, this garden shovel can handle almost any yard job. The 20.5-inch D-handle offers plenty of grip options, and the second-in-shaft rubber makes this one of the most comfortable shovels we’ve used.
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This shovel also stands out in terms of durability and strength. There was no visible damage after our testing, even after intentionally hitting the tip on a few rocks. And the shaft has all the strength needed to pull stones and roots out of holes. The steps on the blade have raised steps to keep your feet stable while pushing. This is one of the best shovels we’ve tested, as well as one of the most affordable.
The Root Killer Garden Spade is a high-quality spade that performed very well in all of our tests. The D handle is comfortable to use from many positions, which helps give the paddle plenty of leverage, despite the slightly shorter shaft length compared to some of the other paddles we tested. Overall, this shovel is easy to dig in, cutting through dirt and sweeping along the garden bed.
The real differentiators for this shovel are the serrated edges along the sides of the blade. Cutting roots just like a saw, making working around plants quite easy. We were able to cut a root that was over 1 inch in diameter in less than a dozen strokes of the saw. That said, the tip of the spade isn’t as sharp as others in our guide, especially with the improvements on the side of the blade specific to cutting roots. Additionally, the serrations somewhat reduced the shovel’s performance when it came to moving dirt.
If you plan to work in an area with a lot of roots, such as a heavily wooded area, this is an excellent shovel. However, if you are not anticipating fighting the roots, then the saw tooth blade is probably not necessary.
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The Radius Garden 201 Pro ergonomic stainless steel shovel has one of the best handles of any shovel we’ve tested, an important feature when shopping for a garden shovel. The handle is roughly round with a rubber coating, which makes it flexible in terms of where to grip and very comfortable even without gloves. The paddle’s rubber grip near the bottom of the shaft makes it easy to rest your second hand as comfortably as possible.
The other great feature of this shovel is how much dirt it can move. Instead of a flat blade like many of the other shovels in this category, this one has a curved blade, which allows for much larger scoops than some of the others. However, this concave shape has a drawback. It is very difficult to cut a straight line with a shovel, as it would be with an edge. The edges inevitably end up baked.
Now, if you don’t intend to roll with your garden spade, this isn’t a problem at all, but it does limit the tool’s versatility and is ultimately what kept this spade away from our top spot.
The Bully Tools 12-Gauge Edge and Planting Spade is a very simple and straightforward mid-range tool. The straight fiberglass handle keeps the weight relatively light and the shovel easy to manipulate. It’s long enough to get a solid pry into the obstruction in the hole and has a nice flat blade to match the edges. It’s not a tool meant for moving a lot of dirt from here to there, but it will do a pretty good job moving dirt around your immediate work area.
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The problem with this shovel is the durability issue. This is one of the few shovels that has a blade