(MONEY Magazine) – The handle snapped with a sickening crack. I should have known better; it was December in Vermont, after all, and I had no business chopping at the half-frozen ground. Suddenly my prized old onion hoe was useless. And even though it was the simplest of tools--narrow blade, straight neck, long wooden handle--I knew I would have a hard time replacing it at any local store. Who stocks hoes in December in Vermont? Nobody. So I decided to turn to the Internet.

You might think that the Net and the garden are incompatible. After all, for many of us the garden is where time slows to a pace in tune with nature--a place we go to escape fax machines, e-mail and the World Wide Web. Surprisingly, though, gardening sites have taken vigorous root on the Internet, growing in number and scope since the early '90s, when, as the manager of CompuServe's now defunct Garden Forum, I first started cyber-gardening. These days you can find everything from discounted seeds and plants to tools and garden advice.

When shopping for garden supplies, baby boomers usually turn to upscale boutiques like Smith & Hawken (www.smithandhawken.com) or Gardener's Supply Co. (www.gardeners.com). Both of them are known for high-quality tools and environmentally friendly supplies, so that's where I started. A search for "hoe" on the Smith & Hawken site turned up 48 items, but none ended up being something you could use to whack at weeds. Further clicking failed to locate what I was looking for. Much the same thing happened at Gardener's Supply. Like my local hardware store, these sites had apparently put their hoes in storage. It looked as if I'd have to weed out some of the more obvious choices to find the best sites. Here's what I found:

The one-stop shopping site www.garden.com

With over 20,000 items, Garden.com is the 800-pound rutabaga of the online gardening world. No matter what time of year it is, you can find just about anything that's even vaguely connected with the garden, including, of course, seeds, plants and cut flowers but also oddities like AstroTurf coasters.

As one of the few Internet-born garden-goods companies, Garden.com offers all the bells and whistles that a good postmillennium site should. This isn't necessarily a good thing: It took me quite a while to find the hoes, not because of a slow search engine, but because I was distracted by all the eye-catching interactive features. That said, some of them are useful, fun or both. I found, for example, lots of timely--albeit rudimentary--gardening tips targeted to my region. (Oops--time to mulch the perennials!) I could have also checked out some photos of the site's pick for garden of the month or chatted with other gardeners, but the feature I couldn't resist was the online garden-design software, which enables you to enter your growing conditions and aesthetic preferences to get a list of plant recommendations. The results were on the simplistic side, but beginners would find them useful--in any case, the exercise was a lot of fun.

Once I finally got down to business, the site's search engine turned up 17 hoes. Unfortunately, none of them were the simple onion hoe on which my heart was set. The closest thing was the half-moon hoe at $39.95 plus $6.79 shipping--more than I had really intended to pay. As a matter of fact, prices at Garden.com tend to be a bit higher than at other, more single-minded sites. That said, I have ordered from Garden.com in the past and always found the service outstanding and the shipping fast and inexpensive.

The price leader for gear www.amleo.com

You won't find good-looking models, fancy graphics or nifty interactive features, but for the best prices and selection on gardening tools and accessories, it's hard to beat A.M. Leonard. The search engine works well only if you already know the product code number. But when I clicked directly on the product category listing for long-handled tools, I found 17 different hoe entries, each accompanied by a clear photo and a good description of the item, including its size and weight. I quickly found an onion hoe just like the one I broke, priced at $25.21. Instead, I could have bought a replacement handle for $18 and attached it myself. But I went for the whole hoe, paid $7.95 for shipping and had it in hand within a week.

Top plant discounter www.bluestoneperennials.com

Though Garden.com offers a good selection of small plants, most gardeners I know prefer to shop around for the best price before buying. I'm no different, and I usually wind up making most of my plant purchases from Bluestone, which offers a large selection of popular perennials, sold in packs of young seedlings, at deep discounts. Bluestone's website is even better than its excellent print catalogue. You can search by plant name or let the site select plants based on your climate, soil type and color and height preferences. When I entered my zip code and requested a yellow summer-flowering plant to grow in normal soil in a mostly sunny location, I was rewarded with a list of more than a dozen possibilities. I chose Rudbeckia "Goldsturm," the Perennial Plant Association's 1999 plant of the year. The price: $8.50 for three plants, plus $6.70 shipping.

The shrub and bush specialist www.whiteflowerfarm.com

For larger, more developed plants, as well as rosebushes, shrubs and even some trees, White Flower Farm is your best bet. Prices are on the high side but, given the quality, reasonable. For the most part, the site replicates the company's extensive catalogue. But it also recommends plant combinations and provides links to general information. The site also excels at keeping up with what's hot in the garden by offering the latest hybrids and passing along recent pronouncements by trend-spotting experts.

The seed superstore www.johnnyseeds.com

There are scores of online seed companies, but Johnny's Selected Seeds is the best all-around site, combining great service and selection, useful information and competitive prices. The site merges the content of the company's two paper catalogues: home garden and commercial. You can browse by category--flower, vegetable or herb seeds or gardening accessories--or run a search by variety or brand name. You'll find a large selection of standards such as tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots and marigolds, as well as more unusual crops like mesclun, that trendy mix of salad greens. (Johnny's offers two mesclun mixes, mild or spicy, at a reasonable $3.40 a packet or $9.95 an ounce.) Johnny's is also the only site I found that promises to ship all orders within 48 hours year round. And it offers an excellent array of online fact sheets with, for example, detailed instructions on how to plant and harvest mesclun.

The specialty seed boutique www.cooksgarden.com

Johnny's goes well beyond standard Big Boy tomatoes, but the best source for specialty seeds is Cook's Garden. You'll find a better selection of mesclun mixes, for example (it offers seven, including tangy, mild, garnish and classic European, for $2.50 a packet or $7.50 an ounce) as well as an outstanding array of heirloom tomato seeds. Cook's is also one of the few companies to offer a good selection of reliable organic seeds.

Warren Schultz, a former editor at Garden Design magazine, is the author of A Man's Turf (Clarkson Potter). E-mail online shopping questions to online_shopping@moneymail.com.