Last Updated on December 7, 2020 by Aaron von Frank

Are you trying to find the perfect gardening gift for that special gardener in your life? You’ve come to the right place! We happen to know a little bit about this subject…

We’re gardeners and gardening writers who also teach gardening to other gardeners. Got it? (Bet you can’t write a sentence that uses the word “garden” more than that one.)

We’ve given and received lots of fantastic gardening gifts over the years. Plus, we listen to what our gardening peers say they want and need.

Based on our experience, we’ve come up with 19+ Gardening Gifts (with a few tag-along/accessory items included) to make it easy for you to shop for that special gardener in your life. Whether you have a wheelbarrow full of money or just a few dollars in your pocket, there’s sure to be a gift idea below to match your budget! 

19+ Gardening Gifts For Any Occasion & Budget

Before we start our gardening gift list, three quick notes:

1. Most of these gifts are ideal for home food gardeners (edible plants), but some will also be perfect for folks who just enjoy working out in their yard even if they don’t grow edible plants.        
2. There is no particular order to this list, e.g. it is not arranged from best to worst, alphabetical, or any other way.
3. Click on any of the links or product images in this gift guide to learn more information about the products (current prices, color & size variations, etc).   

Gardening Gift #19: USDA certified organic seed Variety Packs

Yes, we’re biased, but our sister site, GrowJourney.com, is also a USDA certified organic seed company that happens to have something any food gardener will love: unique variety packs of unique heirloom/open-pollinated seeds grown on organic farms.

There are multiple Variety Packs to choose from (each under $20), so you can get one or multiple packs depending on your budget. Each Variety Pack contains five specially selected seed varieties.

• Check out the Variety Packs over on GrowJourney! 

Gardening Gift #18: Cold Frame

We’ve written about when, why, and how to use cold frames here. In short, they’re awesome for: a) starting seeds while keeping your seedlings warm and protected outdoors; and b) growing food outdoors in the fall and winter in a relatively small space.

For the gardener in your life who wants to push their growing season or start their own warm weather seedlings outdoors while it’s still cold outside, cold frames make a great gift!

Gardening Gift #17: 6’x8′ Hobby Greenhouse 

If budget isn’t an issue and you’re shopping for someone who is a serious gardener, consider getting a gift they’ll never forget: a hobby greenhouse.

With a greenhouse, they can do things like start their seasonal seedlings months ahead of time, or grow potted tropicals and other plants that might be difficult to grow in their climate zone.

Gardening Gift #16: German Crock Pot for Fermentation/Sauerkraut

One good problem you encounter as a gardener is sometimes having too much food to eat all at once. What do you do when you have 100 pounds of carrots, cabbage, kale, radishes, etc in your harvest basket that you can’t possibly eat all at once or even fit in the fridge?

As we’ve written about elsewhere, the answer is to use those veggies to tend the microbial garden inside you by making long-lasting and delicious home fermentations such as sauerkraut. The best tool to help you do that is a good German fermenting crock pot.

Gardening Gift #15: Perennial Fruit, Nut, and Berry Plants

Fruit and nut trees, berry bushes, cane berries… These make a great gift for someone with a large yard or garden. Years back, our parents gave us a gift card to a plant nursery. We loaded up on fruit trees, nut trees, berry bushes and cane berries.

Every year since, those plants get bigger and produce more fruit than the year before. A plastic gadget gift might be broken or forgotten in less than a year, but these plants can live and produce delicious food for many years (and possibly many lifetimes depending on the species).

*Note: The type of fruit, nut, and berry plants best suited for a particular location will vary depending on the climate zone (example: a cherry tree won’t grow in Miami and a Papaya tree won’t grow in Maine). It’s best to get a gift card and let the recipient select their own varieties that will grow where they live, unless you know what they want and/or what will grow where they live.

Where to buy: good organic nurseries: 

• Walden Heights Nursery (Vermont) 
• Rolling River Nursery (California)
• Useful Plants Nursery (North Carolina) – not certified organic, but an incredible permaculture nursery that does things right
• *or google “organic nursery” near you to find nurseries that don’t use systemic pesticides like neonicotinoids that will kill pollinating insects like bees.

Gardening Gift #14: Chicken or Duck Coop

We’re duck evangelists and we love our egg-laying Welsh Harlequin heritage breed ducks. However, we also appreciate chickens. Regardless of whether you’re a gardener who keeps chickens or ducks AND regardless of whether you live in an urban or rural area, you have to keep your poultry protected from predators. A well-planned and well-constructed coop is a critical part of the equation…

• *Note: Ducks don’t roost and therefore have a different style of coop than chickens. If you want to build a duck coop like ours (image above) here are instructions.
• Chicken coop – You can also buy a good affordable chicken coop online

Gardening Gift #13: Wheelbarrow

It might sound strange to a non-gardener, but a good wheelbarrow is essential to a gardener. Don’t believe us? We loved Cindy (our old wheelbarrow) so much we wrote her a moving eulogy when she “died.”

If the gardener you’re shopping for does NOT have a wheelbarrow and you have the financial resources to get them one, you have a moral obligation to do so.

The Aerocart 8-in-1 all purpose wheelbarrow is one we swoon over: 

Gardening Gift #12: Edible Mushroom Kits

If you’ve ever read our articles, you might have noticed that we love foraging wild mushrooms. However, there are plenty of wild mushrooms that can kill you or make you wish you were dead, so we don’t recommend mushroom foraging unless you know what you’re doing.

However, one perfectly safe way to enjoy your own freshly harvested gourmet and medicinal mushrooms is to grow them yourself. Thankfully, there are gifts that make that process very easy, and we’ve enjoyed growing lots of different varieties of gourmet mushrooms in our garden over the years.

Three of the most popular are “chicken of the woods” (you will swear you’re eating chicken), oyster mushrooms (taste more like scallops than oysters), and shiitakes (delicious flavor commonly used in Asian cuisine).

Recommendations: 

• chicken of the woods plug spawn 
• oyster mushroom grow kit
• shiitake plug spawn

Gardening Gift #11: Cedar Raised Bed Kit

We have a full edible organic landscape, but many gardeners have pots on small patios or raised beds in their yard. If someone is just getting started, making a well-constructed cedar raised bed from scratch might seem daunting, especially if you don’t have a truck to haul the lumber or a nearby store to get cedar lumber.

If so, this 2 x 8 x 10.5′ cedar raised bed kit could make the perfect gift. *You do NOT want to use treated lumber or creosote railroad ties in your garden as these both contain an array of harmful chemical compounds that you do not want your plant roots to uptake.

Gardening Gift #10: Top Gardening Books

We read a lot about gardening and agriculture. Learning helps with doing. Ask anyone who is really good at what they do and we guarantee you they’ll tell you they’ve spent quite a lot of time learning and reading about it.

It’s tough to narrow down, but our three favorite gardening books of all-time are:

1. Teaming With Microbes by Wayne Lewis & Jeff Lowenfels 
2. Gaia’s Garden by Toby Hemenway
3. Edible Landscaping by Rosalind Creasy

Gardening Gift 9: Worm Bin

Worms are pretty magical creatures. If you know anything about soil or organic gardening, you know how important worms are in the grand scheme of things.

One way to tap into all the goodness that worms have to offer is to get a home worm bin so you can convert your food scraps to worm castings. This can drastically improve your soil and plant health. (*PRO TIP: If you’re on a shoestring budget and you want to make a worm bin as a gift; here’s a 10 minute video from University of Maine that will show you exactly how to do it. We know it works, because it’s the system we use at home.)

Gardening Gift #8: Garden & Harvest Baskets

There are a lot of reasons why people participate in organic gardening, but perhaps the biggest reason is the food you grow is so dang delicious. Plus, you can grow varieties of produce that you won’t ever find in a store and eat it right when it’s perfectly ripe.

However, gardens don’t come with shopping carts. Whether we’re picking food from our garden or going foraging in the woods, we always have our harvest basket with us. We picked one that will last a long time, is extra large, and was well-made by workers that weren’t exploited in a sweatshop: a Fair Trade Bolga Market Tote Basket. (Please go the same route if you get this gift!)

Option 2: Mod Hod Garden Baskets are an extremely useful harvest basket that we recently discovered because we were gifted one by a parent. We can’t say enough good things about how incredibly useful this basket is – it’s very durable, the legs fold up & down, and you can rinse fruit, roots, veggies, etc super easily outdoors with your hose sprayer! (A Mod Hod is specially helpful when harvesting and rinsing ginger and turmeric roots!)

Option 3: Tubtrugs are another fantastic discovery we’ve been using this year for large harvests, carrying potting soil, etc. 

Gardening Gift #7: Grow Light Setup

A grow light setup is a great gift for someone who is getting serious about home food gardening. We grow hundreds of varieties of produce throughout the year and we start all of our annual and biennial plants from seed for the warm and cold-weather growing seasons.

If you’re growing a lot of plants from seed, a grow light setup is essential if you don’t have a really sunny sunroom or greenhouse. We constructed our own DIY growlights (see our DIY grow light instructions & materials list).

If you want to buy a kit, here’s a full spectrum, highly rated LED grow light setup that’s perfect for starting seedlings:

+Heating Mat – Heating mats really help regulate soil temps and improve seed germination, especially for seeds like tomatoes that love warm soil temps. If you want faster and more uniform germination + better seedling growth, get heating mats. These are the heating mats we use.

Gardening Gift #6: Excalibur Food Dehydrator

We grow thousands of pounds of food in our yard throughout the year (in the fall and winter too). To use all the food we harvest requires canning and dehydrating. Sun-dried tomatoes, fruit leather, smoked pepper powder, etc.. We’ve had a 9-tray Excalibur dehydrator for over 10 years and it’s worth every penny.

Gardening Gift #5: Pressure Cooker

Want to safely can anything from meat to veggies to fruit without the risk of getting botulism? Get a good pressure cooker like the All American. You can safely make tons of delicious canned produce to enjoy throughout the year.

+Weck Jars – These are the style of reusable canning jars we use that are also popular in Europe. No BPA coated lids and super easy to use and reuse without having to replace the lids on a regular basis. They make a nice stand-alone present or add-on present with a pressure cooker.

Gardening Gift #4: Quality Garden Tools

We’ve purchased or been gifted a lot of garden tools over the years, and boy is there a big difference in quality between brands. Granted we put a lot of wear and tear on our tools since we use them so frequently, but we’ve had garden clippers fall apart within a year under light use and others that have lasted for over 5 years in perfect condition even though they get used a lot. Plus, the cheap tools tend not to work nearly as well as the higher quality, more expensive tools.

Tip: if you buy something cheap to save money and then you have to replace it, you haven’t actually saved money (and you’ve wasted time). That’s why we LOVE Corona tools and Fiskars tools. They’re well-made, they work great, and they last a long time. (We have yet to have to replace any of our Corona or Fiskars tools.)

Recommendations: 

• bypass pruners
• Orchard Lopper
• Compound Telescoping Lopper
• Sharpening Tool
• Folding Pruning Saw 
• good Fiskars 3-piece tool set

Gardening Gift #3: Garden Water Dechlorinator

A teaspoon of healthy garden soil might have as many as ~50 billion microbial organisms in it (that’s why those whacky organic gardeners say “soil is alive”). Those microbes make soil systems function, help feed and water your plants, and help keep pathogens and disease-causing organisms from killing your plants.

As you may know, municipal water is full of chlorine that is intended to kill microbes that might otherwise make you sick if you drank them. The problem is that chlorine is a very blunt weapon that does not distinguish between good and bad microorganisms: it kills them all. Watering your living soil with chlorinated water can lead to less healthy, more disease-prone plants.

That’s why we use a water dechlorinator in our garden, and recommend other gardeners do as well. Our dechlorinator screws on and off in 30 seconds and works great (we also use it when filling up our duck pond and duck water bowls).

Gardening Gift #2: Bosmere Haws Metal Watering Can

The Tyrant has been pining away for a Bosmere Haws metal watering can for a while now (she loves the copper one), and this may just be the year she gets one — if she behaves. 

 

Gardening Gift #1: High Pressure, Lead-Free & Drinking Water Safe Polyurethane Watering Hose + Accessories 

If you’ve ever smelled the first few minutes of water that come out of a standard garden hose on a hot summer day, you might have realized that there is some pretty bad chemical leaching going on in there.

That contaminated water is going into your garden, or perhaps going into the water bowl of a pet or your flock of ducks and chickens. Thankfully, there’s a better, safer alternative for gardeners who care about these sorts of things.

The Flexzilla garden hoses we use are 100% lead-free and drinking water safe. We’ve had them for several years, and they’re as good as the day we bought them.

*Length ranges from 25-100 ft (we have two 100′ hoses so we can reach anywhere in our large yarden.)

+ Hose Holder Pot – As an add-on gift for the hose. This elegant hose holder pot allows you to store the hose between uses and keep it out of the elements.

+ Radius Garden Sprinkler-Sprayer Combo – As an add-on gift for the hose. We love these sprayer-sprinkler combos so much that we wrote an entire article raving about them (after using them for over a year). No more taking off the sprayer to put on the sprinkler attachment or vice versa.

The handles flip open to form a sprinkler base with multiple settings AND the ability to easily adjust the water pressure. Such a useful garden tool! 

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We hope this gardening gift guide helps make your shopping a little easier!