The Best Shovel

In my years working on a cattle ranch and farm, I picked up plenty of practical knowledge (and preferences) on the details of shovel design. Spending days setting fence posts teaches you what works and what doesn’t. I also did a lot of shoveling at Jansen Tree Experts, outside of Philadelphia, and at the Scott Arboretum, where I was doing landscaping work. I have a deep appreciation for tough, well-designed digging tools—when it snows, I free my car with an old coal shovel.

For every type of digging job, there’s a specialist shovel designed to do it perfectly. What most of us need first is an all-purpose shovel that can do just about everything well.

The regular shovel you’ve seen all your life is known as the #2 round point, or pony. We asked professional landscapers, tool manufacturers, and others in the shovel trade to recommend a general-purpose, do-it-all shovel. Without exception, that’s the type they named. So that’s what we looked for as an all-purpose shovel.

Transplanting spades (aka drain spades or sharpshooters) are a great help in the garden. They have longer but narrower blades than pony shovels, and they have short, sturdy handles with a D-shaped grip. They’re perfectly adapted to many gardening jobs, from digging new planting holes to prying up stumps and rocks. And when you’re working in tight confines, their compact size gives them an advantage over long-handled shovels.

We looked for what manufacturers call professional-grade shovels. They’re built more robustly than the generic shovels you’ll find at any hardware store. Their handles are stronger, better at absorbing shock, and less likely to loosen or degrade over time. Their blades are made of heavier-gauge steel (generally 14-gauge, versus 16-gauge; lower numbers mean thicker metal). And the blades are usually heat-treated to make them more durable and less prone to cracking.

We preferred closed-back blades. They have a steel plate covering the pocket on the underside of the blade where it meets the socket. This adds strength, keeps dirt from piling up in the pocket, and protects wood handles from dampness and rot.

We wanted a long-lasting, comfortable handle. Between solid steel designs, synthetic handles, and of course wood options, we didn’t exclude any types. But we did seek a combination of details that suggested the handle could absorb shock, resist rot, and generally endure the hard-knocks shovel lifestyle.

For pony shovels: I spent six hours doing three separate tests at Smiling Hogshead Ranch, a community farm in Long Island City, Queens.

First, I loaded and unloaded mulch from a wheelbarrow. The mulch was coarse, saturated with rain, and partially frozen—stern stuff. Then I turned over the farm’s compost pile—light work.

Finally, I dug up and tilled what Smiling Hogshead regulars call the “devil’s strip,” a narrow sward between the sidewalk and the stretch of industrial road that borders the farm. This was about as tough a job as you could encounter: The dirt was heavily compacted, full of rocks and broken concrete, and bound by the ropey roots of overgrown weeds.

I drew one broad conclusion almost immediately: Three of my test models weren’t merely heavy-duty—they were massively overbuilt for everyday use. I pulled them aside and evaluated them separately.

For transplanting spades: I worked in my backyard in New Jersey. Rotating through a test group of six spades, I broke up and cultivated the hard-baked dirt in a pair of raised-bed planters, and I pried up a couple of old hydrangeas and a number of maple saplings. I re-cut the border of a paver-laid patio, and I uprooted dozens of dandelions that had been growing unchecked for years. Broken bricks and construction aggregate in the soil added a surprise element to the proceedings.

The Bully Tools 82515 is a rarity in Wirecutter testing: a runaway winner. It’s an almost ideal combination of form, material, and function, and nearly every detail is done exactly right. Price-wise it’s in line with competitors, but with its markedly superior functionality, it’s a steal. It is 100% American-made and comes with a lifetime warranty against manufacturer’s defects.

Here’s what sets it apart:

It has a wide step. A shovel’s step is the folded-over back of the blade that you stand on when forcing the blade into the ground with your foot. The Bully’s crisp-edged, dead-flat step is both wide and deep; this helps minimize foot slippage and provides a broad platform that spreads digging pressure comfortably over a wide area. The other shovels we tested had small and/or rounded steps that were prone to slippage and created pressure points when we pushed on them.

It offers a heavy-duty blade. The Bully also has a superior blade. It is made of thick, 14-gauge steel, like most of the shovels we tested.

Its handle is a hybrid design. The Bully’s handle is unique among those on shovels we tested. It consists of a polypropylene core wrapped in high-strength fiberglass. (An outer polypropylene layer prevents the glass fibers from escaping; they can cause irritation.) The result is an incredibly strong handle that’s also lightweight and rot-proof. Whereas solid fiberglass handles have an unpleasant tendency to whip or shudder on impact, resulting in sore hands, the Bully’s hybrid handle absorbs shock almost as well as a solid wood handle.

Its socket is strong. Just above the blade, you’ll see another feature not found on any other shovel we tested: a welded “I-beam” on the arch of the blade-socket transition. It adds stiffness and strength under heavy loads. The socket itself extends almost a foot up the handle, spreading digging forces over a large area, and it’s both glued and riveted in place. Pry as hard as you like.

It offers perfect balance. At 5 pounds 4 ounces, the Bully is neither the lightest nor the heaviest shovel we tested, but it is perfectly balanced around the fulcrum where your lower hand grips the handle. That makes it particularly nimble, especially when transferring materials like mulch and dirt. Many of the other shovels were blade-heavy and constantly wanted to tip toward the ground, even before they were loaded up. That gets irksome during extended use.

And Bully shovels have proved to be truly durable. Wirecutter senior staff writer Doug Mahoney has had an earlier version of our pick for seven or eight years, and he uses it for all sorts of jobs on his New Hampshire farm—laying pipe, digging post holes, whatever is needed. The padded rear grip finally gave out, but Doug plans to fix that with some new grip tape. The handle itself and the blade have survived just fine.

Other people also dig it. In the extensive positive reviews on Amazon, Home Depot, and Bully’s own site, comments like this one, from the owner of a tree nursery, are typical: “You will bend or break before this shovel will. Seriously, I’m having a shovel-gasm right now.”

Flaws but not dealbreakers

The Bully shovel’s handle doesn’t swell at the fore and aft grips, as many shovel handles do. This did not bother me, and it might even be an advantage for those with smaller hands. People with really large hands might find gripping the relatively narrow handle tiring. It’s nothing a wrap or two of athletic tape won’t solve.

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.

We ordered the Spear & Jackson Planting & Rabbiting Spade 1047MY without realizing it’s substantially smaller than most transplanting spades (38 inches long, versus a typical 48 inches, with an 11-inch blade versus a 16-inch one). This was a lucky mistake: The Spear & Jackson proved to be just as capable as larger transplanting spades on all but the toughest prying-and-uprooting jobs, so it’s an obvious choice if you need or prefer smaller tools.

But its size has advantages that almost any gardener will appreciate. We found it easier to use in the confines of a raised-bed planter, for example, and the same would be true if you were working in a densely planted hedge or garden. Along the border of a paver-laid patio, its narrower blade did a serviceable job as an ad-hoc edger. It’s dynamite on dandelions, even gnarly diehards with taproots like parsnips. The blade cuts the root deep below the surface, and a little prying and tugging gets the whole plant out of the ground. Shake the soil back into the hole and tamp things back into place with your heel, and you’ll barely leave a mark on your lawn. We think it might also be of interest to car campers, as a space-saving and agile—yet extremely sturdy—tool for digging fire pits or freeing stuck wheels.

The ash handle is lightweight and comfortable, the extra-long steel socket adds strength, the blade is sharp and sturdy, and even the paint is tough—the one in the photo showed barely a scratch after hard use in extremely gravelly soil. It lacks the double-wide handle that makes the Fiskars spade so notably capable and comfortable for heavy-duty prying. But for many gardening jobs, this one’s smaller size is just the thing.

Like root canals and emergency septic-tank service, ultra-heavy-duty shovels are a response to unpleasant circumstances. But if you need to uproot an entire garden’s worth of shrubs and tree stumps, or trench a few hundred yards of rocky soil to lay new irrigation lines, or pry up a patio’s worth of concrete pavers to make room for the new hot tub, we recommend the Corona All-Steel #2 Round Point Shovel AS90300.

It weighs too much to be practical for everyday jobs—loading and unloading a wheelbarrow is enough of a chore without adding 3 or 4 extra pounds to each scoop. Its oversize, all-steel construction is immensely strong, but it also transmits every shock and impact directly into your hands and shoulders.

Though it’s the same #2 size and shape as the Bully’s blade, the Corona’s blade is made of thicker steel (12-gauge versus 14-gauge), and it’s heat-treated for improved durability. Even the stickers Corona uses on it are tough—they refused to come off, even after I scrubbed them with turpentine.

The Corona has 2 inches less lift than a standard shovel (4 inches versus 6), meaning the handle lies closer to vertical when you’re digging straight down. So if you’re excavating tree stumps, that means less leaning over and less chance the handle will pinch your hands against an adjacent tree trunk or fencepost when you start prying out the stump.

And it comes with padding on the handle and a bolted-on rubber footstep, which its heavy-duty competitors lacked. These little features make a big difference in user comfort, and they should be standard considering the prices these premium tools command.

All three of the ultra-heavy-duty shovels we tested performed impressively when I was digging up a roadside median. Their thick, sharpened blades and incredible prying strength cut through the hard soil and loosened buried rocks with noticeably greater ease than the everyday shovels. Build quality was equal among the three, too—clean welds, neat edges, and smooth paint jobs. But the small details above set the Corona AS90300 apart.

Pony shovels

The Root Assassin OS-002 One Shot Shovel has a special “winged” head, with a larger step that extends around the sides and sets it apart from other round-point #2 shovels. We don’t think this new design can stand up to the tried-and-true function of the standard round-point shovel head, even though the reviews so far are great.

The Razor-Back 2593600 is extremely robust, with its trademarked extended SuperSocket, and the traditional wood handle is comfortable and shock-absorbing. But it’s heavier and more tiring to use than the Bully.

The all-steel Fiskars 96685935J is a very well-built tool. But it’s heavy for a general-purpose shovel: Mine weighed 94 ounces—almost 6 pounds.

W. W. Manufacturing’s LHV-PT-R is known as “the King of Spades.” It enjoys an enviable reputation among professional gardeners, orchardists, and nursery workers, but it’s a specialist tool. The keen edge is more easily dulled by rocks than the other ultra-heavy-duty models. And it’s too heavy for general use.

Transplanting spades

The Bully Tools 12-gauge Drain Spade is as sturdy and thoughtfully designed as its pony shovel, which has been our pick in that category since 2015. It’s a bit too overbuilt to be an ideal transplanting spade; in particular, the thick, 12-gauge blade doesn’t come sharpened, and so it was harder to shove through roots and lawn thatch.

The Ashman Drain Spade has small, narrow steps, making it less stable and comfortable when you are shoving it into the ground with your foot.

The Husky 28-inch Wood Handle D-Grip Carbon Steel Drain Spade’s name alone is about four times wider than the tiny, unsupportive steps on the back of its blade—it’s even smaller than the Ashman’s. This one and the many similar models we evaluated—including drain spades under the Ames, Ace, John Deere, and Razor-Back labels—were easy dismissals.

The Kobalt 32-inch Fiberglass D-Handle Drain Spade is well built, but (like the others listed here) it lacks our top pick’s double-wide handle. And the flared top of its blade makes a wider cut than any other spade we tested; that’s a downside for gardening work.

We did not test models like the A.M. Leonard Full-Strap Diamond Point and the King of Spades Nursery Spade, which are aimed at professional arborists. They’re undoubtedly as durable as can be, but our picks are plenty sturdy enough for gardening and yard work—and they cost far less.

This article was edited by Harry Sawyers.