Favorite garden tools
Posted: July 18, 2009 Filed under: 3. Food Security | Tags: food forest, permaculture Comments Off on Favorite garden tools
My favorite garden tool is easily my hori hori garden knife that you see pictured here. When I first looked at these I thought they were a bit ridiculous. They look like a giant Rambo survival knife. Useful for those frequent cases of being attacked by rabid deer, but other than that…
It turns out to be that large because the hori hori functions just like a similarly sized hand spade. It also has a handy serrated edge for slashing through small weedy vines and a forked end that pops root weeds up instantly. I love this thing. Mine did not come with a sheath and no local shops had any standalone sheaths the right size, but I found one that fits online.
Be careful you don’t accidentally treat it like a hardened steel Rambo knife, though. I was slicing through some weedy vines on a rock wall with my first hori hori and accidentally smacked the rock pretty hard. The blade snapped right off of the handle.
Other favorites include the typical hardworking wheelbarrow. I’ve used this dumping style wheelbarrow in the past (still have it), but I’m currently happy with my extra large, lightweight, two-wheeled version.
Other frequently used items include my pitchfork to turn the compost bins weekly and zip ties to quickly secure everything, from bird netting on our cherry trees, to sunflowers falling over themselves with too-big blooms. Note to fellow fans of Square Foot Gardening, when Mel said you can use raised beds that are only 6″ deep, he was probably not thinking you are going to put 10′ sunflowers in those beds. Use a zip tie to attach them to a bamboo stake.
Yes, I know zip ties are a doomed products and a complete ecological waste since they are yet another plastic made of petroleum. When I run out of my current stock, I plan to exclusively use hemp twine.
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