Gift Guide for the Beginner Gardener

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Speaking from personal experience, sometimes it’s hard to know what gifts to get for your loved ones! I hope this gift guide for the beginning gardener in your life is helpful. I tried to keep the ideas simple and relatively inexpensive.

All the links below are my personal favorites, which is why they made it on the list! The only things I don’t have myself are the tee shirt and the trowel but they are both on my wishlist for this year. I am an affiliate of some of these recommendations (full disclosure found here).

Books: 

I recommend three books for beginners. For more information about these books and to see an in depth look, check out my video review HERE.

1. Vegetable Gardening for Beginners $11
2. Four Season Farm Gardener’s Cookbook $13 (The gardening section is excellent for beginners!)
3. The Garden Primer $16 This one is more of a reference book. 

Tools:

As a beginner, all you need are a few basic tools to get started. Back when I had a smaller garden space, these tools would have been so useful!

4. A Soil Knife helps to pull out tap rooted weeds like dandelions and other stubborn weeds. It can be used to cut plants at the soil surface during harvest and even has inches on it to measure distance between plants if you’re transplanting. I own three of them so that my kids and I can work together 🙂 $19

5. I like a Trowel a little more than a soil knife for transplanting because the trowel can pull up the soil and the soil knife doesn’t do that as easily. $21

6. Stirrup Hoe If you’re growing in a small area, a hoe may not be necessary. But for a mid size in-ground garden a hoe is vital (in my opinion). My favorite kind right now is a stirrup hoe. The one I’m linking is more on the expensive side, but it is meant to last 10x as long as the others and is also easier to use. $61

Apparel

Sorry in advance to any guys out there- these picks are definitely feminine because I personally use them and that’s my style!

7. I’ll be in my office tee shirt This shirt is so cute! It’s on my wishlist this year. $26
8. A good basic pair of gardening gloves to get started. These gloves run SO SMALL! I have small hands and wear a large in this exact style. $9 
9. An alternative pair of gloves that are a different style are THESE GLOVES. $9

My recommended seeds for beginners:

10. This pack of seeds comes all packed in a box as a collection. A perfect gift for a new gardener. $24 [Edited to add: until Monday November 21st, use coupon code N3WFOR2023 for 10% off any order of $50 or more from this seed company.]

If you’re not interested in the curated gift box, here are my top ten seed picks for a beginner because they are easy to grow! All are heirlooms for easy seed saving. Granted my picks come from all different companies, so that doesn’t make it easy (I wish they were sold all in one spot but no luck there). However, I do know these are all good varieties!

Tomato: Eva Purple Ball

Cucumber: Beit Alpha

Green Beans: Provider

Summer Squash: Lemon

Lettuce: Coastal Star

Herb: Genovese Basil

Carrots: New Kuroda

Pea: Sugar Snap Pea

Pepper: Emerald Giant

Watermelon: Crimson Sweet