It's easy to overspend on tools before you've even planted anything, so it helps to know what a genuinely new home gardener actually needs versus what can wait. A short list of core tools covers almost everything a beginner vegetable or herb garden requires in its first season.
A spade or digging fork is the first essential. You'll need one or the other for turning over new garden beds, digging in compost, and general heavy digging work. A hand trowel is the second must-have: it's what you'll use constantly for planting seedlings, digging small holes, and working compost into an established bed without disturbing everything around it.
Secateurs, or hand pruners, are worth buying properly rather than as an afterthought. They're used for deadheading, harvesting, and cutting back anything from herbs to small woody stems, and a blunt or poorly made pair makes every one of those jobs harder and messier than it needs to be. A hose or watering can rounds out the core list: containers and new seedlings both need regular water, and which one suits you better depends mostly on how large your garden is and whether you've got an outdoor tap nearby.
Gloves are the last of the genuine essentials. A decent pair protects your hands from thorns, splinters and the kind of skin irritation that comes from handling soil and compost regularly, and they're cheap enough that there's no reason to skip them.
Beyond that core list, plenty of tools are genuinely useful but not essential on day one. A wheelbarrow earns its keep once you're moving compost or soil around in any real volume, but a bucket or two does the job well enough for a small first-season garden. A hoe is handy for weeding larger areas efficiently, and more specialised pruning tools, loppers, long-reach pruners, and the like, are worth buying once you actually have something in the garden that needs them, rather than in advance.
One practical note worth taking seriously: buy one decent hand tool rather than several cheap ones. A trowel, spade or pair of secateurs gets picked up and put down dozens of times in a single gardening session, season after season, so it's genuinely worth spending a bit more for something that won't bend, snap or blunt within a year. Cheap versions of the tools you use least often are a reasonable way to save money; cheap versions of the tools you use constantly usually aren't.
buy one decent hand tool rather than several cheap ones