Martha Stewart's Must-Have Gardening Tool When Dealing With Tomatoes

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Martha Stewart knows a thing or two about gardening; in an interview with NPR, she says she may have started gardening at younger than 3 years old, helping her dad. She notes that the garden has always been her refuge, and she published a gardening book called "Martha Stewart's Gardening Handbook: The Essential Guide to Designing, Planting, and Growing" in early 2025. Her first gardening book came out in 1991, and on her blog, she often discusses tomato-growing topics. 

She says that she experiments with different methods for supporting the tomatoes from time to time, and prefers bamboo stakes as an alternative to tomato cages since the stakes are much taller and bamboo is a renewable resource. Martha Stewart's must-try tip for growing tomatoes is a tall tipi-shaped support structure made from bamboo. 

Whether using vertical stakes or several angled stakes tied together to support tomatoes, they need to be secured in the ground. In a throwback YouTube video, she uses a crowbar to dig the holes for the stakes and to tamp down the soil around them once they're in the ground.   

The crowbar Stewart uses isn't any garden-variety tool small enough to fit in a toolbox. She uses a long crowbar, between 4 and 5 feet long and without a curved nail-pulling head at one end. One comparable example is a pinch point crowbar by True Temper; it's 4 feet long and weighs 10 pounds. The added length and weight of this crowbar style makes it easy to create holes in garden soil without stooping or squatting down to do so; your back may thank you for digging the Martha Stewart way. The weight of the bar does the heavy work, breaking up the soil until the hole is 8 to 10 inches deep. Once you reach that depth, insert a bamboo pole, then use the crowbar to push the dirt back into place and tamp it down. 

If you like the idea of saving your back from the laborious work of digging countless holes, some crowbar-style tools are even more suited to the task. The Bully Tools steel tamping and digging bar has one chiseled end and one rounded end. The chiseled end helps cut through clay soil or old roots, while the rounded end could be smacked with a hammer to help cut through tough clay, or used to tamp down soil afterwards. 

Crowbars and digging bars literally raise the bar on potential digging methods for immense garden planting projects, and they don't take up as much space as a wide-headed shovel. If you're tired of digging weeds out of the ground, you can also try Martha Stewart's 3-ingredient weed killer, which is simple to make.