Otto’s Garden Toolkit

The tools for the job.

The equipment mentioned throughout Otto’s Garden Handbook, gathered in one place.

You do not need everything on this page. Each section explains what the job actually needs first, so you can decide whether you already own something that will do it.

Otto’s Garden Toolkit is about choosing the right tool for the job, not filling a shed with things you do not need.

The products listed under each heading are examples of equipment that fits the job. They are not products Otto has tested, and none of them is put forward as the best of anything.

Weathered hands sowing seed thinly in a row into a wooden seed tray
01Section

Starting Seeds

Trays, pots, labels and something that mists rather than pours.

Almost everything that goes wrong at this stage goes wrong for one of two reasons: the seed was sown too thickly, or the tray was watered too hard. Both are equipment problems as much as technique problems.

Sow in rows rather than scattering. There is a real reason beyond tidiness — if damping off starts, it travels along a row and stops, whereas in a broadcast tray it goes everywhere. And sow thinly. You will always want to sow the whole packet. Do not.

Then cover the tray with something that holds the moisture. Glass, a propagator lid, or the clear plastic punnet a supermarket bought its strawberries in — they all do the same job, and one of them is free.

Everybody labels. Almost nobody writes the date. The date is the useful half — it is what tells you, three weeks later, whether you are being impatient or whether nothing is coming.

On the list 6 items
Hands working fine seed compost into a tray beside a sack of potting compost
02Section

Soil & Potting

Two different composts, and the tools for handling them.

You dig a trowel of good dark earth from the garden, fill a pot with it, sow your seed, and nothing comes up. It is not your seed. Garden soil fails in a pot for three reasons: it is not sterile, it is too heavy, and it does not drain well.

So you buy compost — and here is the part most people never learn. Seed compost and potting compost are not the same thing. Seed compost is milled fine and nearly free of nutrients, because a seed carries its own packed lunch and a strong dose of fertiliser around a new root does harm rather than good.

Fine and lean for sowing. Coarser and richer for growing on. If you buy one bag, buy seed compost and feed the plants yourself later.

Never reuse the compost from a tray where seedlings died of damping off, and never use garden soil in a seed tray. Those two rules alone will save more of your plants than anything else in the handbook.

On the list 8 items
A galvanised watering can with a fine rose watering a tray of seedlings
03Section

Watering

The thing that kills most of them, and the two tools that stop it.

More seedlings are drowned than dried, and the reason is a genuine trap. When compost is waterlogged the air is pushed out of it, the roots suffocate, and the seedling collapses from the top down — which looks exactly like thirst. So the gardener waters it, which makes it worse.

The fix is not about the leaves. Put your finger in the compost. A wilting plant in wet compost is drowning; a wilting plant in dry compost is thirsty. The leaves cannot tell you which. The compost can, and it takes two seconds.

Use tepid water, somewhere around twenty to twenty-five degrees — blood temperature or a little below. Cold water increases the risk of damping-off infection, and a jug left standing in the room overnight costs nothing.

Check every day. Water when it needs it. Those are not the same instruction.

On the list 4 items
Secateurs and a bundle of cuttings tied with twine on a potting bench
04Section

Pruning & Harvesting

Secateurs, scissors, and a knife for the things you lift.

Most of what you will cut in the first year is soft — a sprig of mint, a spring onion top, a few leaves off a celery base. Scissors do that perfectly well, and secateurs take over once a stem has gone woody.

The one place the cut itself matters is when you are taking a cutting to root. Cut straight across at the bottom and on a slant at the top, and do it as you cut rather than later — once you have four stems in your hand and no idea which way up they went, the slant is the only thing that tells you.

Straight cut at the bottom, slanted at the top. Do it as you cut, not later.

On the list 5 items
Herbs and salad leaves growing in terracotta pots against a brick wall
05Section

Growing in Pots

Pots, bags and beds — and the crops that must be kept in them.

Some plants belong in a container not for convenience but for containment. Potatoes grown from supermarket tubers carry a disease risk to your soil, so they go in pots. Jerusalem artichokes go in a container or they stay in your garden forever.

For everything else, the rule when you move a plant up is unglamorous: set it at the same depth it was before, unless it is a tomato or it is leggy and you know the species tolerates burying. Then water it in straight away, which settles the compost around the roots and reduces the shock.

The instinct is to put a small plant into a big pot to save doing it twice. Resist it. A small root system in a large volume of compost cannot dry that compost out, so it stays wet — and we know what wet does.

On the list 4 items
Beans climbing a frame of bamboo canes in a raised bed
06Section

Supporting Plants

Canes, ties and clips — and a gap I should own up to.

I have to be straight with you here. Staking is the one category on this list the handbook does not cover. I could not find an authority who had actually tested tie materials or cane spacing against each other, and I would rather hand you a gap than a guess, so there is no chapter on it and there will not be a paragraph of invented advice here either.

What I can tell you is the one thing the handbook does say that bears on it, because a stake is very often bought to fix the wrong problem. A seedling that has gone long and thin and pale is not short of a stick. It is short of light.

And that matters more than it looks. A stretched seedling is vulnerable to collapse from minor watering changes and to damping-off infection, so leggy is not a cosmetic fault — it is a plant that is going to die of something else. Propping it up addresses none of that. Move it somewhere brighter and cooler instead.

A cane holds a plant up. It does not make it strong. Light does that.

On the list 7 items
Seedlings in pots on a cool bright farmhouse windowsill
07Section

Indoor Growing

Lights, a heat mat, and knowing when to switch each one off.

A seed and a seedling want opposite conditions, which accounts for a great many sad floppy plants on windowsills in March. A seed wants warmth and does not care about light. A seedling wants light and prefers to be cooler.

Most seed germinates between eighteen and twenty-four degrees. Then take the bottom heat away once about half the seeds have sprouted, and let it run cooler and brighter from there. A cool bright room grows a stocky plant. A warm dark one grows a weed.

Not everything wants the mat at all. Cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower and sweet peas germinate best at about thirteen degrees, and will sulk on a heated surface.

Take the bottom heat away once about half the seeds have sprouted. It is the step almost everybody misses.

On the list 6 items
An open wooden compost bay, part filled, with a fork standing in it
08Section

Composting

A heap or a bin, and the one ratio that decides whether it works.

Roughly two to three parts brown material to one part green, by volume. You will see a figure of thirty to one quoted online — that is a chemistry ratio of carbon to nitrogen, not a bucket ratio, and following it literally gives you a heap of sticks.

Greens are grass clippings, soft weeds, vegetable peelings, old fruit, coffee grounds. Browns are prunings, dead stems, straw, autumn leaves, torn cardboard, woodchip.

For moisture, grab a handful and squeeze it. It should feel damp and produce a drop or two of liquid. Not a trickle.

Expect one to two months of active heat and another month or two of maturing. Call it three to four months, and stop looking at it.

On the list 2 items
A raised bed of young brassicas under fine netting held clear on hoops
09Section

Pest Protection

Barriers, which work — and the remedies that do not.

A physical barrier is the one form of pest control that does not depend on anybody believing in it. Netting works because the insect cannot get through the mesh. That is the whole mechanism.

Which is worth saying, because several of the remedies you will be told about have been tested and found not to work. Eggshells as a slug barrier: a Royal Horticultural Society trial found no reduction in damage, and so did the University of California. Coffee grounds as a slug barrier: the same.

And one pest is not a pest at all. Fungus gnats — the little dark flies running over the compost surface — are an overwatering symptom wearing an insect costume. Let the surface dry out between waterings and the numbers fall on their own.

Before you buy a remedy, check whether anybody has tested it. A surprising number of the famous ones have been, and failed.

On the list 4 items

You probably need less than you think.

A spring onion in a glass of water needs almost nothing. If you are starting seeds properly, good compost, gentle watering and enough light will make the biggest difference. Everything else is there when the job calls for it.

The book itself

Otto’s Garden Handbook

50 plants. 99 pages. An honest verdict on every one.

View the handbook