There is no shortage of tools marketed to homesteaders. Walk through a farm supply store or spend twenty minutes on a homesteading forum and you will encounter an overwhelming number of things that someone, somewhere, believes you cannot do without. When I share advice on the best gardening and homesteading tools, I usually say two things that are slightly contradictory: buy the best tool you can afford – better tools will save you time and money over the long term. And at the same time – when you are just starting out, don’t go blow you whole budget on tools – choose a few to buy the best, and the others find inexpensive and upgrade over time.
The tools worth owning are the ones that do a job nothing else does as well and that you will actually use enough to justify owning. The list below contains 20 of them, organized across six categories: garden and soil, fencing and infrastructure, workshop essentials, food processing and preservation, animal care, and land and property management.
At the end, there are five tools you can confidently skip: widely owned, heavily marketed, and genuinely less useful than the alternatives. This is the harder list to write, because the marketing on these items is persuasive and the purchase regret is slow to arrive. But it is worth being honest about what earns its space on a homestead and what does not.
Hello I'm Gretchen! We've been homesteading for over 15 years and sharing our stories to help you on your journey. Here at the Backyard Farming Connection we are connecting the dots between gardening, raising animals, and from scratch cooking and baking. Make sure to sign up for our newsletter to get up to date recipes, gardening tips, and support for raising backyard animals.
The tools in this section are linked online (purchasing them here helps support my free content – you can also look locally for these tools)
Contents
The 20 Tools Worth Owning
Homesteading Tools: Garden & Soil
The tools that spend the most hours in your hands are garden tools, and the quality difference between a poor tool and a great one is felt on every single use. The four tools in this section cover soil aeration, weeding in two different situations, and the most-reached-for implement in any garden — and together they replace a far longer list of single-purpose tools.
1. Broadfork
A broadfork is a two-handled fork with long tines that you push into the soil with your body weight and lever back to loosen and aerate without inverting. In an established bed, this is nearly always better than tilling – it breaks up compaction, improves drainage, and allows deep root penetration without destroying the fungal networks and soil layering that took seasons to develop. One pass through a bed at the start of the season is all most established growing areas need. For gardeners committed to low-disturbance growing, this is the single most important tool they own.
2. Stirrup Hoe (Hula Hoe)
The stirrup hoe also called a hula hoe or scuffle hoe, has a hinged blade that cuts on both the forward and backward stroke, slicing weed seedlings just below the soil surface on every pass. Compared to a standard flat hoe, which only cuts on the push stroke and requires more force, the stirrup hoe covers ground faster with less physical effort. Used once a week in established beds when weeds are still at the seedling stage, it keeps a garden weed-free with minimal time investment. Sharpen the blade with a file regularly for best results.
This is the tool I’m personally upgrading this year.
3. Collinear Hoe
While the stirrup hoe excels at weeding between rows, a narrow collinear hoe, with a long, thin blade set at a shallow angle, is designed to work within rows, between plants, without disturbing their roots. Together, the stirrup hoe and collinear hoe cover every weeding situation in a vegetable garden. The collinear hoe is used with an upright posture, drawing the blade toward you in light, shallow strokes just below the surface. It is especially effective in beds of closely spaced crops like onions, lettuce, and carrots where a wider tool would damage plants.
4. Quality Hand Trowel
A hand trowel is the most-used tool in any garden, and the quality range between a cheap stamped-steel trowel and a forged one is dramatic. Cheap trowels bend, rust, and lose their edge. A forged stainless or carbon steel trowel: from a manufacturer like DeWit, Sneeboer, or Burgon & Ball, holds its shape under pressure, stays sharp, and will be in service decades from now. Buy the best trowel you can afford and treat it as a permanent piece of equipment, not a consumable.
5. Garden Shears
Garden shears are handheld cutting tools designed for pruning, trimming, and shaping plants with precision. They’re ideal for cutting back perennials, harvesting vegetables, deadheading flowers, and keeping shrubs and small branches tidy—all without damaging the plant. Clean, sharp cuts help plants heal faster and reduce the risk of disease, making shears one of the most important tools for maintaining a healthy garden.
Homesteading Tools: Fencing & Infrastructure
Fencing and property work require tools calibrated to the physical reality of the task. Post driving and wire tensioning are jobs that punish improvisation — the wrong approach is slower, harder on your body, and produces a result that fails sooner. The hori hori is the outlier here: it belongs in this section because it travels between garden and infrastructure work more than any other handheld tool.
6. Post Driver (Manual or Pneumatic)
Driving T-posts by hand with a heavy driver is slow and exhausting. A manual post driver a steel tube with handles that you slam down over the post is the minimum; a pneumatic or tractor-mounted post driver is transformative if you are installing any significant length of fence. Even the manual version is far faster and less punishing than improvising with a maul or sledge. If you keep animals, you will be driving posts regularly for the life of your property. Own the right tool for it.
7. Fence Stretcher
Woven wire and high-tensile fencing that is not properly tensioned at installation sags, corrodes at stress points, and fails prematurely. A fence stretcher a simple lever-and-grip tool that grips wire and allows you to pull it to proper tension before stapling is inexpensive, lightweight, and essential for any serious fencing installation. Wire fencing installed with a stretcher lasts dramatically longer than wire installed by hand. This is one of those tools that pays for itself on the first project.
8. Harvest Knife (Hori Hori)
The hori hori is a Japanese soil knife with a stainless steel blade, one serrated edge, one straight edge, and depth markings on the blade. It transplants, divides roots, opens bags, cuts twine, digs up weeds with taproots, and harvests root crops more cleanly than a trowel. Gardeners who own one wonder how they managed without it. It lives in your pocket or tool belt during every garden session and handles half the tasks that would otherwise require switching between tools.
Homesteading Tools: Workshop Essentials
A homestead workshop does not need to be large or expensive, but it needs to be capable. The four tools in this section cover the work that a rural property requires: processing wood from the property, shaping and fitting timber for structures and equipment, and maintaining the metal tools and implements that everything else depends on.
9. Draw Knife
A draw knife, a long blade with a handle at each end, pulled toward the user, removes material from green or dry wood quickly and with excellent control. It is the primary tool for shaping fence posts, making tool handles, debarking logs, and rustic furniture construction. Once you have one and know how to use it, you find applications everywhere on a homestead. It works best with a shaving horse (a leg-powered work holder) but can be used freehand for lighter work. Green wood shaves beautifully and the work goes fast.
10. Chainsaw
On a homestead with any significant amount of tree cover, a chainsaw is not optional. It processes firewood, manages storm damage, clears brushy areas, mills basic lumber, and handles dozens of tasks that would require prohibitive time with hand tools. The investment in a quality saw, the safety equipment to use it properly (chaps, helmet with face shield, gloves), and the training to operate it safely is non-negotiable. A well-maintained chainsaw with a sharp chain is a safe, efficient tool. A neglected saw with a dull chain is genuinely dangerous.
11. Drill
A cordless hand drill handles the majority of everyday woodworking tasks—drilling clean holes, driving screws, and tackling a wide range of projects with speed and control. With the right bits and settings, it delivers precise, consistent results while making work faster and more efficient than manual tools.
Homesteading Tools: Food Processing & Preservation
Processing and preserving food is the activity that most directly translates homestead production into household food security. The tools in this section are the ones that enable you to do it safely, efficiently, and at the quality level that makes the effort worthwhile. None of them is inexpensive; all of them are worth the investment for a household that preserves food seriously.
12. Pressure Canner
Water bath canning is sufficient for high-acid foods, jams, pickles, tomatoes. For everything else: vegetables, meat, beans, soup stock, a pressure canner is required for safety. The temperatures reached inside a pressure canner (240°F at 10 PSI) are sufficient to destroy Clostridium botulinum spores that survive boiling water. A quality pressure canner — All American or Presto are the standard choices — is an expensive purchase that will last decades with proper maintenance. It is not a tool to economize on, and it is not optional for anyone preserving low-acid foods.
13. Grain Mill (Hand or Electric)
Whole grain stored intact keeps for years; ground flour goes stale within days as the oils in the germ oxidize. Milling your own flour immediately before use produces a product that is nutritionally complete, richly flavored, and unlike anything available at the grocery store. A hand mill works without electricity and builds real arm strength. An electric stone burr mill does the same work faster. Either way, the investment is paid back in the quality of everything you bake, and in the ability to store grain rather than flour for long-term food security.
14. Vacuum Sealer
A vacuum sealer removes air from bags before sealing, dramatically slowing oxidation and freezer burn. Properly vacuum-sealed meat stores in the freezer for two to three years without quality loss; standard zipper bags begin to show freezer burn within months. For dry goods — flour, nuts, dried beans, powdered herbs — vacuum sealing in mason jars using a jar attachment extends shelf life by a factor of three to four compared to loosely lidded storage. The machine pays for itself in reduced food waste within a year in most households.
15. Food-Grade Fermentation Crocks
While you can ferment in a mason jar, a proper ceramic fermentation crock with a water-seal lid creates an anaerobic environment more reliably, prevents kahm yeast contamination, and produces more consistent results. A good crock is a generational piece of equipment — used daily for the fermented foods that form the backbone of a homestead diet. Two to five gallon sizes cover most household fermentation needs. The initial investment is significant, but the quality difference in the ferments, and the reliability of the process, justifies it for serious homesteaders.
Homesteading Tools: Animal Care
Animal care tools tend to be either safety equipment or monitoring equipment and both categories deserve serious investment. A restraint that fails, a water supply that freezes unexpectedly, or a health problem that goes undetected until it becomes serious are all more costly than the tool that would have prevented them.
16. Stock Tank De-Icer
Animals cannot safely go without water even in extreme cold, and breaking ice in stock tanks twice a day in a northern winter is both time-consuming and unreliable. A submersible de-icer maintains water temperature just above freezing using a thermostatically controlled heating element — running only when needed, drawing minimal power. The cost of a quality de-icer is recovered quickly in the time saved, and the health benefit to animals of consistent access to unfrozen water through winter is measurable in their condition and productivity.
Homesteading Tools: Land & Property Management
Managing land at homestead scale, whether that is a quarter acre or twenty acres, requires tools matched to the work and the scale.
17. Scythe
A properly fitted and sharpened Japanese-style scythe, not the heavy, bent-handle American version, cuts grass, cover crops, and tall weeds with a smooth, almost silent swing that is less physically demanding than it appears. On small to medium areas, it competes with a string trimmer for speed while producing a cleaner cut, generating no noise, requiring no fuel, and leaving no exhaust. The blade is maintained with a whetstone rather than mechanical sharpening. A scythe that fits you properly is a pleasure to use; the wrong size or a dull blade makes the work miserable.
Homesteading Tools: The 1 You Can Skip
1. Rototiller (for established beds)
The rototiller is the default recommendation for garden bed preparation, and for breaking new ground it has real utility. But for established beds, regular tilling is actively harmful it destroys the fungal networks and soil layering that took years to develop, creates a hardpan layer just below the tine depth, and brings weed seeds from deep in the soil profile to the germination zone with every pass. The broadfork achieves the legitimate goal of aeration and loosening without any of this damage. If you are starting new beds, till once to break ground.
After that, retire the machine. The few times I’ve needed a rototiller I rented it for the day
On Buying Well
A theme runs through the tools on the ‘worth owning’ list: they are tools that reward quality investment. A cheap stirrup hoe bends. A poorly balanced broadfork is exhausting to use. A pressure canner with a warped lid is unsafe. In each case, the cheap version creates frustration or failure that erases the saving.
For power tools and machinery, buy the category leader if you can afford it, and second-hand if you cannot. A used All American pressure canner, a used BCS tractor, a used chainsaw from a reputable brand all of these will serve you better than a new version from a brand you have never heard of. Read forums, ask experienced people, and buy the tool that professionals in your field of work trust.
They have usually already made every mistake available, and their recommendations reflect it.
Just straight up homesteading ideas sent directly to you.