The Yellow Farmhouse Garden

I’ve hoed a lot of long rows this season. Now it’s time to touch up the edge on my garden hoe.

The hoe I’ve been using for more than 15 years is a Dutch made, swan-neck style. Its light-weight head combined with a curved shank makes it a pleasure to use. As an added bonus it has an extra long handle which makes easier for a taller guy like me to operate. I don’t have to bend over in an exhausting, awkward position to reach the ground.

Nearly every hoe I’ve seen has the wrong bevel on the cutting edge. Right from the store, hoes often have a flat edge with no bevel at all. People take them home and immediately grind a sharp, angled bevel, like a wood chisel edge. That makes a very sharp edge but it does not last very long. It soon gets dull cutting through the soil. So gardeners end up working in their garden with a perpetually dull tool.

The proper way to form an edge on a hoe is to file a curved profile on the back of the hoe blade i.e. the side facing away from you when you use it. Keep the front of the blade metal flat, don’t grind it.

File the back of the blade, the side facing away from you when you hoe.

Imagine if you were to cut the blade in half with a hack-saw. Looking at the cross section of your blade edge with a microscope, you would see the front face ending at a right angle while the back face curves to meet the front edge.

Most of the wear on a hoe blade happens on the back side of the blade edge. A rounded back edge leaves much more metal on the side of the edge that is prone to wearing down.

You won’t be able to shave with that edge but it will last much, much longer in the garden.

Bob

Earlier this week I was out in the garden digging the last of my potatoes.  I had the cold northern winds from hurricane Sandy to keep me company. So that gave me the incentive to get the job done before lunch.

I got a chance to use the antique potato-digging fork I found at an estate sale this summer. It’s a rather hefty tool with several heavy steel tines.  While I was standing in line to pay for it, a guy offered to buy it from me so his son could use it to spread bark mulch. If his son knew, I’m sure he would thank me for not selling it to his Dad. Then, a lady told me she wanted to take it apart and have a blacksmith bend it into a coat-hook. I was glad to save it from that fate.

At first, it was a real struggle wrestling that beast of a tool. I almost traded it for my lighter weight garden fork but decided to keep going.

The secrete I found was to use the weight of that steel to my advantage. By directing the downward force of the tool into the garden soil, I was able lift many more spuds with each forkful than with my garden fork.

I got the job done before lunch and have about 150 pounds of potatoes stored for the winter. The potato-fork has earned a permanent spot in garden tool collection.

I own a lot of different kind of gardening tools. The most unusual one has to be my hand-held rotary hoe.

The single star is the front of the hoe. The handle pivots to allow the tool to be pushed or pulled.

Farmers have been using large rotary hoes for decades. These are non-powered tools, not to be confused with rotary tillers. They were especially popular in the days before chemical herbicides came into wide-spread use.

The design is basically a series of specially shaped discs mounted side by side on an axle 10 or 12 feet wide. There are different configurations; some discs are star-shaped, others have small spoon-shaped ends attached around the circumference of the disc.

To use a rotary hoe, the farmer pulls the hoe behand a tractor at a fairly fast speed. The star points enter into the soil at about  90 degrees — straight down. As it moves forward and  rotates, the point leaves the soil at an angle lifting some soil at the same time. This lifting action pulls up germinating weeds.

It is the weeds you don’t see — those still underground — that get destroyed. By the time you see the first leaves poking up out of the soil, it is almost too late to rotary hoe.

A rotary hoe in action runs right over everything in its path — the crop plants as well as the weeds. The crop plant, usually corn, is well-rooted and can’t be yanked out by the hoe. The leaves get torn up in the process but the corn plant recovers quickly.

Chemical herbicides, increasing labor costs, and high fuel prices caused most farmers to abandon their rotary hoe years ago. Many organic farmers still use them however.

My little hoe is a just a scaled-down version of those large,  farm implements. It actually works quite well whenever I remember to use it early enough.

What’s your most unusual gardening tool?

Bob

North Dakota State University has a good technical article about using a rotary hoe on the farm: http://www.ag.ndsu.edu/pubs/plantsci/weeds/w1134w.htm