wellllll since I'm never qualified to jump into the equipment end of the discussions... lol. here's my two cents. We have a Gerber folding shovel that my hubby acquired through his job. It seems great. He used it when he climbed mt. whitney a couple years ago. I regularly use it for smaller gardening jobs (to my hubby's dismay). The edge is kind of sharp, so I recently used it to cut through roots of stupid rose bush I was digging up, and it was spectacular. This of course, was to my hubby's dismay, as the shovel is supposed to be part of our emergency preparedness supplies. However, I consider a scrawny ugly rose bush to be a bit of an emergency when there are gardenias to be planted. Yeah. LOL. So anyway, here is a link to the shovel, and at only about 50 bucks I consider it a good investment. By the way, anybody know how to post a link so that it actually works as a link, instead of having to copy/paste?

http://www.cabelas.com/cabelas/en/templates/links/link.jsp;jsessionid=QI1YPLJVGRUS5LAQBBKSCNNMCAEFAIWE?id=0066691518952a&type=product&cmCat=froogle&cm_ven=data_feed&cm_cat=froogle&cm_pla=1550102&cm_ite=0066691518952a&_requestid=32770