Great Tools for Your Garden Weeding Workout
One thing that has done very well this year is the weeds. Crab grass, native skunk cabbage, and goldenrod are on my top enemies list.
What is a weed? By definition, weeds are anything growing somewhere you don’t want them to grow.
They can be prize roses or prize vegetables, but if you don’t want them there, they’re weeds.
I used to choose my weeding tools based upon the task at hand. Now I find myself choosing tools by the “what part of my body will ache the least tomorrow morning” school of thought. One can also use a variety of tools to exercise many muscles and make sure that the entire body aches the next morning.
My favorite weeding tool is called a Mattock. It’s a medium-sized digging tool with a flat blade set at right angles to the handle. One side of the blade is flat and sharpened like a hoe. The other side is a set of two or three prongs that can get below any clump of weeds. My current model is a very lightweight one I purchased at an army/navy store and has served me well for many summers. The beauty of the mattock is that you start with the pointed side and use the handle as a lever to pry the weeds out of the ground. When roots are too strong, you turn the mattock around and chop the living daylights out of the dirt until the weeds give up. You work the soil with the mattock in one hand and use the other hand to pull the weeds out once they’re freed. It’s best to weed when the soil is dry as the roots give up very easily then. After you’ve pulled all the weeds in an area, the side of the mattock can be used to smooth out the remaining soil and push the dirt around as you need. This tool gives you a great upper body workout, and depending on whether you kneel or squat, gives your legs a good stretching as well.
A good long-handled weeding tool is the pointed hoe. It is the same height and heft of a regular flat-bladed hoe but the business end of the tool is actually made in the shape of an arrowhead, with sharp edges and a strong point. Using this in combination with a garden rake you can clear some large areas of weeds while you work upright. This tool gives you a great stomach muscle workout though you still need to stoop to pick up the weeds.
For very precise weeding, my favorite tool is a dandelion remover that I’ve sharpened and bent slightly to give it a little leverage. I don’t know the exact name of the tool, but it has a wooden hand grip and a steel handle about 12” long and ends in an inverted V-shaped point. The idea is that you slip it in the soil next to a dandelion, jam it down into the earth as low as you can go and cut the taproot of the plant very deep so it can’t regenerate a new plant, then bend it away from the plant and out pops the dandelion roots and all. This tool is fantastic at weeding small areas of any kind of weeds or for precisely picking among plants that you want to keep. The tool also gives your hand gripping muscles a very good workout.
Probably half the houses in America have tools such as the garden weasel and the turbo weed poppers that you see advertised on late night TV. I will confess to trying them and found that the were easy to use couldn’t compare in effectiveness to my trusty mattock.
For those of you who prefer horsepower to people power, there’s always the rototiller for large areas and a new miniature rototiller has just come on the market for tilling small areas and cultivating between rows of plants. The big one is a brute and not exactly a precision guided instrument but it can make short work of a mess of weeds in no time. The miniature one is also good for container gardens, a plus.
And last, for those of you who believe in better living through chemistry, the improvements in the engineering of selective weed killers is remarkable. I actually tried PREEN for the first time this year, works very slow and is very benign, good product. But it won't give you much of a weeder's workout.
What is a weed? By definition, weeds are anything growing somewhere you don’t want them to grow.
They can be prize roses or prize vegetables, but if you don’t want them there, they’re weeds.
I used to choose my weeding tools based upon the task at hand. Now I find myself choosing tools by the “what part of my body will ache the least tomorrow morning” school of thought. One can also use a variety of tools to exercise many muscles and make sure that the entire body aches the next morning.
My favorite weeding tool is called a Mattock. It’s a medium-sized digging tool with a flat blade set at right angles to the handle. One side of the blade is flat and sharpened like a hoe. The other side is a set of two or three prongs that can get below any clump of weeds. My current model is a very lightweight one I purchased at an army/navy store and has served me well for many summers. The beauty of the mattock is that you start with the pointed side and use the handle as a lever to pry the weeds out of the ground. When roots are too strong, you turn the mattock around and chop the living daylights out of the dirt until the weeds give up. You work the soil with the mattock in one hand and use the other hand to pull the weeds out once they’re freed. It’s best to weed when the soil is dry as the roots give up very easily then. After you’ve pulled all the weeds in an area, the side of the mattock can be used to smooth out the remaining soil and push the dirt around as you need. This tool gives you a great upper body workout, and depending on whether you kneel or squat, gives your legs a good stretching as well.
A good long-handled weeding tool is the pointed hoe. It is the same height and heft of a regular flat-bladed hoe but the business end of the tool is actually made in the shape of an arrowhead, with sharp edges and a strong point. Using this in combination with a garden rake you can clear some large areas of weeds while you work upright. This tool gives you a great stomach muscle workout though you still need to stoop to pick up the weeds.
For very precise weeding, my favorite tool is a dandelion remover that I’ve sharpened and bent slightly to give it a little leverage. I don’t know the exact name of the tool, but it has a wooden hand grip and a steel handle about 12” long and ends in an inverted V-shaped point. The idea is that you slip it in the soil next to a dandelion, jam it down into the earth as low as you can go and cut the taproot of the plant very deep so it can’t regenerate a new plant, then bend it away from the plant and out pops the dandelion roots and all. This tool is fantastic at weeding small areas of any kind of weeds or for precisely picking among plants that you want to keep. The tool also gives your hand gripping muscles a very good workout.
Probably half the houses in America have tools such as the garden weasel and the turbo weed poppers that you see advertised on late night TV. I will confess to trying them and found that the were easy to use couldn’t compare in effectiveness to my trusty mattock.
For those of you who prefer horsepower to people power, there’s always the rototiller for large areas and a new miniature rototiller has just come on the market for tilling small areas and cultivating between rows of plants. The big one is a brute and not exactly a precision guided instrument but it can make short work of a mess of weeds in no time. The miniature one is also good for container gardens, a plus.
And last, for those of you who believe in better living through chemistry, the improvements in the engineering of selective weed killers is remarkable. I actually tried PREEN for the first time this year, works very slow and is very benign, good product. But it won't give you much of a weeder's workout.
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