The 4 Best Shovels of 2025
Best for…
Narrow, short-handled transplanting spades—also known as drain spades or sharpshooters—are brilliant gardening tools. Their long, narrow blades make them far more adept at uprooting and resettling plants than wide, stubby pony shovels. Their shorter handles make them easier to maneuver in tight confines. If you need to bury an irrigation line, set some fence posts, or trench in a new border, these spades cut the amount of dirt you’ll need to excavate in half, compared with using a pony shovel, and they disturb much less of the lawn, too.
After testing six transplanting spades at my home in New Jersey, the Fiskars D-Handle Transplanting Spade came out as our clear first choice.
The Fiskars spade has generous, edge-to-edge steps at the back of its blade. They provide a stable, grippy platform for your foot as you shove the blade into the dirt, and they distribute the pressure over a wider area than the tiny steps many competitors have.
All-steel construction makes the Fiskars spade extremely strong, which it needs to be, since it will often be used for prying plants out of the ground. But it’s not so overbuilt that it feels heavy or cumbersome, even compared with the wood-handled spades I tried.
Most distinctively, the Fiskars’s D-handle is a double-wide: It’s broad enough to be gripped with both hands when you’re levering up a big root ball or a buried rock. In my testing, that proved an immediate, significant advantage over traditional D-handles. Using both hands spreads out the prying load and halves the strain on your wrists and shoulders. It also lets you center your whole weight directly behind the blade, giving you more prying power and balanced, stable footing as you bear down.
By contrast, spades with single-hand D-handles concentrate the load on one side of the body, and they strain the same arm over and over. And you have to twist your torso when prying. After working for even a couple of minutes, the difference can be felt: The Fiskars spade is less fatiguing.
The one thing we don’t like: The black paint, combined with the all-steel construction, means the Fiskars spade gets extremely hot if it sits in the sun for more than a few minutes. It’s something we criticized about the company’s pony shovel when we tested it years ago, and we wish the company would make a change. (In addition to staying cooler—and being easier to see in a dark work shed—an all-orange scheme would also seem to be more on-brand.) But this is a minor quibble about an otherwise outstanding gardening tool.
