Can’t Find the Perfect Garden Tools? Make Your Own
Does hoeing hurt your back? Does the trowel give you wrist cramps? Are the tools at your local hardware store just not up to the job?
Gardening can be such a time-consuming job, but what you put into your garden is what you get back. With a few elementary DIY modifications, you can find and change your tools to suit your individual needs. Put your tools to work for you and watch your garden grow!
Below is an excerpt from Winter Harvest Manual: by Eliot Coleman. It has been adapted for the web.
Garden tools in the hardware store are mass-market products. The shapes and sizes available are constrained to minimize costs and maximize profits—ease of exploit is not the goal.
A few years ago, when agricultural and gardening tools were used by both professionals and amateurs, the choice was much wider, and their design was based more on effective exploit than marketing.
A review of senior tool catalogs or collections in a historical museum will give you some idea. There were plenty of nuances. Shovel catalogs offered all possible sizes, shapes, and blade angles. Regional peculiarities were recognized.
I have an senior tool book that has pictures of dozens of English hedge cutters (chaff cutters).
Each compact variation of the design bears the name of the town or county in which it was created. They were a distillation of centuries of local experience in trimming the different varieties of hedges common in different climates and soils.
Such functional diversity still occurs on compact farms in Europe.
For example, I have been taking pictures of different styles of wheelbarrows for many years. Whether single or double wheeled, wide or narrow, decked or open, there was no single ideal design, but rather many aspirations for perfection.
In addition, farmers added cuts, bends, or welds to standard models to further customize them to their needs. It was like looking at the sketches of an author or artist—a study of the creation and evolution of an idea.
The right hand mason’s trowel was modified into a left hand transplanting trowel by cutting off the tip of the blade and lowering the angle of the handle.
People who play sports encounter similar differences and improvements every day.
Enormous amounts of time, money, thought and ingenuity go into perfecting sports “tools” such as golf clubs, tennis rackets and skis.
Think about the difference graphite shafts, larger sweet spots, and metal laminates have made. How often in your farming endeavors have you wondered if everything would work better if the equipment was modified in a certain way.
While the quality of agricultural and gardening tools is appreciated, there is no market for nuances of perfection, as there is in sports.
The answer to this question is to be your own innovator.
Modifying existing tools or inventing your own is not complicated. Invention doesn’t have to mean factories and engineering degrees, just imagination and ingenuity. Creativity means escaping time-honored patterns to look at things differently.
You can do wonders with a hacksaw, a file, a drill, pliers, and a vice. Stop treating the tool you have as an end product, and instead treat it as a starting point.
A good example is our desire a few years ago to improve the hoes on our farm.
While most of the hoes we owned had a enormous blade set at a 90-degree angle to the handle, there were a few with smaller blades set at an 80-degree angle. These were more pleasant to exploit.
We went to the shop with a few sacrificial hoes and started cutting, bending and sawing. After a few trips to the fields to try them out, we created a prototype with a narrow blade (7 inches side to side and 1 inch front to back) and a bent neck to keep the cutting edge of the blade in line with the handle at a 75-degree angle.
After further experimentation with many keen participants, we determined that the optimal angle is 70 degrees.
We have also found that this type of hoe cuts weeds best when it is sharpened like a chisel, with the piercing edge close to the soil.
Now we sharpen the hoes by holding them with the handle up and filing the top edge of the blade.
I am fascinated by the huge improvements in tool performance that can come from such seemingly compact improvements. Because the blade edge was in line with the handle, we called it a “collinear” hoe.
Another innovation in gardening tools came a few years ago when we changed our transplanting system.
When we started using seedlings grown in soil clods instead of bare-root plants, we found that we were holding the transplanting trowel in an awkward position.
So we created a up-to-date tool.
We modified the solid bricklayer’s trowel by shortening the blade and changing the angle of the handle to be parallel to the blade. In this way, we created a tool in which it is more comfortable to hold the blade pointing down when stabbing and pulling than when digging, and we also created an ideal hole for inserting a block of earth.
Tool modifications were once common practice. Many have been forgotten. For example, a newly purchased scythe blade has a standard angle between the blade and the arbor. When scythes were commonly used, everyone understood that it was up to them to bend this angle to suit their mowing style.
Another example is that store-bought tools typically come in one handle length. Is it logical to assume that the same handle length will be ideal for tool users between 5’4″ and 6’4″ lofty? Don’t struggle with a handle that’s too long or too low—either cut it off or find a longer one.
When choosing the handle length, also pay attention to the type of wood and its grain.
The preferred wood for tool handles has traditionally been ash for long handles like hoe and shovel, and hickory for low handles like axe and hammer. You can see the grain in all those little lines running along the handle.
Ideally, the grain lines should run straight from one end of the handle to the other. If the grain lines run at an angle across the handle, the stress from using the tool will most likely cause a break at that point.
Once you have found a good handle, you will want to keep it in shape by coating it twice a year with pure linseed oil or a mixture of beeswax and linseed. This treatment prevents it from drying out.
Desiccated wood loses its vitality, becomes brittle and more susceptible to damage.
Often the handle length of senior tools had no other purpose than to fit the worker’s height. In the past, when hay was collected in bulk, long hay forks were used to throw the hay into the wagon.
The second worker on the cart used a shorter fork to stabilize the load. Switch the tools and both workers would have been clumsy and incapable. These long forks were veritable “crashing forks.”
Today, pitchfork has become the common name for most utility forks. However, functionally, they are very different. Just knowing by name that there are hay and manure forks, shovel forks, and garden forks will support you find the right tool for the job.
I want to encourage all growers to look beyond the tools that are readily available to them.
Make your farm work easier and more enjoyable by finding unique tools or creating your own. There are many other growers who want to pioneer up-to-date systems and up-to-date crops, who can benefit from your ideas, and who in turn can inspire you with theirs.
We need to invent the future of small-scale farming ourselves so that we all become more productive.