There is a lovely moment when you first stand in a new garden, full of plans, and realise you do not actually own anything sharp enough to make them happen. The good news is that you do not need a shed stuffed with gadgets. A spade, a fork, a hoe, a trowel and a pair of secateurs will carry you through almost everything a British garden throws at you, from soggy clay in February to dry borders in July. Buy those five well, look after them, and you can add the rest as your garden teaches you what it needs.

Start with the digging tools: spade and fork

The spade is the workhorse. A flat, square blade with a straight edge is built for cutting into soil, lifting turf, edging a lawn and turning over a new bed. You dig with your foot pushing the blade in, then lever the handle back to lift the soil. Keep the blade flat when you edge, angle it when you lift. If you are digging heavy clay, a spade with a slightly smaller blade will be kinder to your back than a huge one.

The fork does the job a spade cannot. Where a spade slices, a fork loosens. Four sturdy tines pushed in and levered gently are perfect for breaking up compacted ground, lifting root crops such as potatoes and carrots, and working compost into the top layer without turning the soil into a slick, airless paste. On a new allotment or a neglected border, the fork is often the first tool out of the shed, because it lets air and water back in without destroying the structure underneath.

• Choose: a digging spade with a carbon steel head and a handle that reaches roughly to your hip bone.
• Try before buying: grip the handle as if you were working, wearing gloves. If it feels awkward in the shop, it will feel worse after an hour.
• Handle materials: ash is traditional, light and warm in the hand; fibreglass is tougher but heavier; stainless steel heads shed wet soil better than painted ones.

Trowels and hand forks for close work

Once the big digging is done, the fiddly work begins: planting out seedlings, dropping bulbs into little holes, teasing out weeds between perennials, and potting on. That is where a hand trowel earns its keep. Look for one with a deeply scooped blade and a handle that fits your palm, because you will be gripping it for hours at a time. A narrow transplanting trowel is useful for bulbs and plugs; a wider one moves more soil when you are filling pots.

A hand fork is the trowel's partner. It loosens the soil around shallow-rooted plants, lifts weeds with their roots intact and breaks up clumps in a seed tray. In raised beds and containers, you will probably reach for these two more than anything else in the shed.

• Pick a trowel with depth markings on the blade if you sow seeds at a set depth.
• Brightly coloured handles are easier to find when you have left them in the border again.
• One-piece forged trowels last far longer than pressed metal ones, which bend at the neck.

Hoes: the tool that saves your wrists and your knees

A hoe is the most underrated tool in British gardening. Used on a dry, sunny morning, a sharp hoe slices through annual weeds at soil level and leaves them to wither on the surface. No bending, no kneeling, no backache. There are two main styles. The draw hoe, with its blade set at an angle to the handle, is drawn towards you for chopping and earthing up. The push hoe, also called a Dutch hoe, is pushed away from you just under the surface, cutting weeds off at the root as you walk backwards along the row.

Keep the blade sharp with a file and it will glide. Let it blunt and you will be hacking at the ground, which only brings more weed seeds to the surface. Hoe little and often through spring and early summer and you will barely need to weed at all later in the season.

Secateurs: the cutting tool you will never put down

A good pair of secateurs takes care of deadheading, cutting back perennials, trimming shrubs, taking cuttings and tidying twiggy growth. Look for bypass secateurs, where one curved blade passes a hooked counter-blade. They give a clean cut that heals well. Anvil secateurs crush the stem between a blade and a flat block, which is fine for dead wood but not for living stems. If your hands tire easily, try ratchet secateurs, which cut in stages rather than one squeeze.

• Cut stems no thicker than your little finger; anything larger needs loppers.
• Do not twist the blades through a branch. Position, squeeze, release.
• Wipe the blades with an oily rag after use and sharpen them with a small diamond file.

Handles, sharpening and looking after what you own

Two things separate tools that work from tools that fight you: comfort and sharpness. A handle that suits your grip means you use your whole hand rather than pinching with two fingers, which is how blisters and tendon aches start. If you already have hand or wrist trouble, look at D-handles and long-handled versions of trowels and forks so you can work standing up.

Sharpness is a safety matter as much as an efficiency one. A blunt blade needs more force, and force is what makes tools slip. A few strokes of a file on a spade or hoe edge, and a light sharpen of secateurs, take minutes and transform how the tool feels. Store everything clean and dry, hang long-handled tools off the floor, and wipe metal heads with an oiled cloth before winter. Do that, and five modest tools will serve you for decades.

Buy the best you can afford, in the size that fits you, and let the garden tell you what to add next. That is the whole secret.