What Tools Do Landscapers Use?

Landscapers create and maintain outdoor areas for residential, commercial and industrial customers. Unlike gardeners, who normally focus on growing healthy plants, flowers or vegetables, landscapers must expand their areas of concentration to include the aesthetics of the land in their care. Creating and maintaining outdoor arenas requires the use of various hand and power tools.

Landscapers use basic hand tools, including long-handled maintenance implements like rakes, shovels, picks and lawn sweepers to create and maintain lawns and flower gardens. Smaller manual tools typically include spades and trowels for planting, transplanting and maintaining small plants and flowers and several types of shears and landscaping scissors to prune and shape bushes, shrubs and small trees.

Many jobs can be more efficiently completed by using landscaping tools powered by electricity or gas. Powerized hedge and line trimmers enable landscapers to quickly prune greenery, manicure the edges of gardens, walkways, flowerbeds and rock gardens and use topiary skills to trim hedges, bushes and trees into decorative shapes and designs. Landscapers use gas or electric chainsaws to shape large shrubs and hedges, as well as trim branches and limbs from large trees to keep them healthy or prevent them from interfering with other plant growth.

Lawnmowers and leaf blowers are two of a landscaper's most important tools. They use push mowers, either electrically or manually powered, to access smaller areas between trees and walkways and riding mowers to keep large expansive areas of grass neatly trimmed quickly and regularly.

In additional to practical tools of the trade, landscapers must have safety goggles, leather or heavy duty synthetic gloves that protect hands from sharp edges and thorns, and protective face masks to keep them safe when they are using herbicides, pesticides, insecticides, fungicides or fertilizer/pesticide combinations.

Technological tools and gadgets can help a landscaper run the business more efficiently, productively and profitably. If the landscaper's client base is widespread and requires regular travel to remote or rural locations, installing a GPS (geographical positioning system) in his company vehicles makes finding these destinations faster and easier, saves money on gas wasted searching for new addresses and keeps track of employees out in the field. Investing in landscaping management software programs helps keep track of customer information, streamlines billing procedures, calculates payroll and deductions and tracks inventory needs and expenses.