Today I am sharing some of our favorite garden tools for weeding, and trying out two new weeding tools.
We have been using the Hoss Wheel Hoe for many years, I’d say more than ten. It has remained at the top of our useful tool list. We use the weeding attachment, not the cultivating hooks.
Purchase the Hoss Wherl shoe using this link:
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Weeding attachment:
https://amzn.to/3TBc7EM
My favorite hand tool is the Trapezoid hoe from Johnny’s Seeds.
https://www.johnnyseeds.com/tools-supplies/weed-control/hoes-cultivators/trapezoid/
Greg’s favorite hand weeding tool is the Stirrup Hoe, similar to the new one I am trying today.
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The two sided hoe/cultivator tool can be purchased here:
https://amzn.to/3FNzOH0
And the Japanese sickle/weeding tool can be purchased here:
https://amzn.to/3GbsoNE
As Amazon affiliates, we may receive a commission if you choose to make a purchase using these links.
#garden #weeding #gardentools #offgridhomestead #handtools
every morning that weather permits I head out to the garden to try to get some weeding done before the sun gets really hot this just helps me try to beat the heat without getting a sunburn and I’ve been staying pretty faithful at it i’m determined to keep the weeds down if I can do it most of the garden is falling to me this year because of Greg’s accident but I think he was feeling a little bit left out with that in mind he did some shopping and got me some things that should help make the weeding easier welcome to Ridge Haven Homestead from the mountains of Upper East Tennessee we share snippets of our off-grid life cabin build and garden blessings pour yourself a cup of tea sit back and take a peek into our off-grid home and family [Music] the audio is glitching out just on this one little clip so bear with me so every day when I go up to my garden area since it’s not right at the house I take my little caddy with me in my caddy has my essential tools that I think that I’m going to need for the day so the first thing that I have in my caddy are my garden gloves now my garden gloves hardly ever get used i almost always end up with dirt under my fingernails but it’s a nice thought this little bitty tel is nothing expensive but it does help for making holes when I plant things so I always keep it with me i always keep my clippers in case I need to clip some heavy weeds and then I have some bug spray which I sometimes remember to use i have a little jar that has garden tags and markers so that when I plant seeds I can try to remember i’m not always faithful with that and then I keep a pair of heavy duty scissors besides that it’s random seeds and I don’t know I don’t even use all this stuff all the time it just makes me feel good to have that with me in case I need it when it comes to the actual weeding though there are five basic tools that I wanted to talk to you about three of them we already have and two of them are ones that Greg just ordered and so I’m going to be unboxing them putting them together and showing you how they work i’m going to be testing them cold today because I have Yeah I have no idea we’re just unpacking them to find out so the first tool that he got was this Japanese weeding sickle and in the description and on the tool and several warnings all in the box it says very sharp edge and I can see that it does have a very sharp edge it also has this sheath on it with a snap that’s really hard to get off which I’m struggling with right now because I’m afraid that just in the process of opening this snap I’m going to cut myself once I can get that off I’ll be good to go okay finally i’m setting this aside but I’m keeping that little sheath even though it’s just made of plastic so this does have a super sharp edge and it’s a really nice size for doing hand weeding i anticipate that this one will be used for very precise hand weeding when I want to get down there close when I don’t need to do like a mass amount of weeding i have other tools that are for the mass weedings but this is actually looking like a really good tool just have to be really careful and don’t store it around your kids the other tool that I am unboxing is a type of scuffle hoe it’s a two-sided made by such such tail it’s 82 in stirrupo and a five ton rake now this looks like a small hand weeding tool but it’s not it’s actually 82 inches long with a handle that comes in pieces which I’m going to be putting together in a second now immediately as we took this out of the box Greg and I noticed the same thing that the metal that is makes up the stirrup ho feels thicker than our other scuffle ho i call it a scuffle hoe he calls it a stirup hoe i think the actual name is a stirup hole a stirrup hoe but this one has the additional side with those really strong tines which I think is going to be pretty useful it will remain to be seen if this side with the with like the Ushape or the D-shape edge is as good as some of our other scuffle hoes because like I said it not only feels a little bit thicker which was is going to be good for strength but if you want to be slicing through weeds you want a thin sharp piece of metal so there’s kind of a delicate balance between strength and sharpness and I’m going to test and find out if this will actually cut through the weeds like say our wheelho or our other stirup hoe our other stirrup hoe I believe is from I can’t remember who makes it but we got a good one we’ve had it for many years this one feels good and strong with a metal handle i think I like the part of the metal handle we’re just going to have to see the thing about these stirrup hose or scuffle hose is that when you use them there is a slight rocking motion or a slight give in the part that does the weeding so I can’t really explain it very well but it it actually helps the weeding since there is some assembly required bear with me while I put the handle together and then we will head up to the garden to give these things a try when we opened the box initially Greg did put the top part of the tool together and so I only had to do the handle my husband actually asked me yesterday if I was done with the weeding he knows that I come up here every day and work for a couple hours on weeding or whatever that needs to be done and I think he might have been concerned that I would have all the weeding done and I wouldn’t need the new tools never fear my love never fear there’s always areas that need weeding just when I got the main area done yesterday done which means I got this portion done and then I can probably look at the other side and there will be more weeds that have been growing because we’ve had so much rain but never fear when I get one garden area done I have another terrace to do so I’m going to be doing this one behind me this one has our watermelons we just have a few but a lot of grass is already growing so I brought this so I’m going to try this one first and at first when I was testing it out I haven’t actually tested it in the garden but when I was feeling the handle I thought “Wow this thing is so wobbly.” Like you see this but then I realized I have to twist it you don’t just pop it in you have to twist it tight and so that has firmed it up a lot i just need to do these two right here and now they’re all firmed up so here we go i’m going to be using a combination between this my wheel hoe my traposite hoe and then when I need to do the nitty-gritty little bitty stuff I’ll use that new Japanese hoing thing and we’ll see how I like that but I do have some things to work around so yeah never fear there’s always weeds [Music] there is hardly a moment in the garden or anywhere that I go on this property that I don’t have a few little friends coming to check out what I’m doing keep me company and just in general bug around like they do [Music] believe it or not for the most part I kind of enjoy weeding sometimes it makes me really tired it gets my back sore but I like being out as long as it’s not too hot once it starts getting hot I call retreat and I head inside but as long as it’s breezy and cool in the morning hours or even in the evening it’s kind of relaxing it’s kind of just nice to be out there hearing the birds being with the cats and seeing progress being made [Music] [Music] my first impressions are of this tool i like it pretty well i really like this part of it because having that on the other side where I can break up the ground really is helpful now this is really good for weeding but one thing that I figured is kind of coming true the thick metal is so smooth that I think that if I were working in anything other than softened ground like this this behind me we’ve just gotten rain every single day almost so the ground is pretty soft so I think if if I had like hard clay like we usually have that this would probably just scrape over the surface of it and it wouldn’t cut because it’s not that sharp it is pretty strong and I do like that part of it so I it is a joy to use especially since I can you know chop up and rake with this side so I’d say I like it but I like our wheelho a little bit better for things that are like tough because it will get in there and it will cut more so they all have their uses now I’m going to try I’m going to go ahead and do the wheel ho for the other stubborn stuff little bit of stuff I have left we have had this wheelho for many years it is built really well and we’ve tried to take care of it but it’s just really really a joy to use and I think it’s a joy to use because of just how strongly it’s made and how they’ve designed the metal so that it does indeed slice through the weeds and it doesn’t hurt your back as much in the end I did grab my trapezoid hoe that we did get from Johnny’s and I use that for going in smaller places [Music] okay let me give this a try i do have some fine weeding that I need to do not a lot here so this one I’m sorry about the sound my microphone is in the house the other one died so I have to just holler a little bit oops I just uprooted something [Music] i’m sure that plant will die anyway since I uprooted it but I always like to give them a chance to live if they might [Music] this one I’m definitely loving this one it is so sharp the only caveat I would add for this one is go slow because you can very easily chop off the heads of your desired plants and keep it out of reach of children because it is not only sharp here this is actually very sharp it makes it makes weeding a joy i could have really used this when I was painstakingly weeding around my holy basil in the terrace below because it was growing all in with the Bermuda grass so this one is great i’m really loving this one i’m not sure how long it’ll stay sharp um I’m hoping for a good long time yeah so when you need to do fine weeding this is a great tool all of the tools have their place this trapezoid hoe if you can see it it does have a lot of mud on it and we’ve used it quite a few years we’ve probably had this one seven or eight years at least and so this could this could do to be sharpened we got this from Johnny’s and this has been my standard hoe i like this one the best and if one of my guys would sharpen this I think I would like it even better because I’m pretty sure back in the day it did have a sharper edge but we have so many rocks on our property that it’s taken some abuse those little things you see are not nicks that’s just mud on there on the edge so that one is my preferred choice for doing fine weeding if I want to do more precision weeding but it certainly doesn’t get as precision as this tool if I want to get down on my hands and knees basically this is the way to go and I do like our wheelho our wheel ho is probably my favorite because you have to expend less energy it looks like you’d use more energy but just the way that it’s designed it cuts through the through the weeds a lot better than let’s say the the recent acquisition that we got so definitely if you have a lot of weeds I would go with the wheelho if you have the money it’s a bigger investment for sure this one here I do like i feel like it has its use um I’m like I told you for softer ground for getting the weeds out before they’re really really in you know really out of control this would be a really good one i suspect my husband will like it but I suspect also that he will not like it for the for the ways that I mentioned which is just that the blade is a little bit thicker and it’s almost a little bit rounded it’s probably safer but when you want to cut weeds you want to cut them so yeah here’s a I mean this is an array of tools that we have i haven’t showed you all the tools that we use we I do like we have like a small thin rake which is really good for precision also but these are the ones that I pretty much grab every day there is one tool that I have around here somewhere i think it’s in the greenhouse it h it’s a it’s a hand cultivator also and it has three prongs on one side and a flat edge on the other like just a regular flat hoe i really like that for doing for doing close work as well but I think this one will probably become my hand goto tool so that just gives you a few ideas i would honestly if you have a small homestead like ours is is pretty small in other in that we don’t have like farming implements we don’t have tractors and stuff like that we are doing everything with our hands so these things I feel like are pretty good additions i’m liking every single one of them that I’ve tried i did not show you our typical scuffle hoe i’ll just show you that in the picture that one is good for weeding it’s very similar to this this one that we have with the tines on the back only it is sharper so there again in places where the wheelho could not go the scuffle hoe can go between rows between plants to some degree yeah when you have a garden you will find that you that you end up having to get different tools for different jobs but for I think my favorite well I don’t know i told you that this one is my favorite probably for fine weeding but for overall weeding and getting a lot done the Wheelho really can’t be beat it’s probably our biggest investment as far as as you know kind of like hand tools but we’ve had it for many years and it is if you take care of it it will go on and on you can you can actually get attachments for the wheelho besides that scuffle hoe we that’s the one that we mostly use but you can get those kind that go like this that that can cultivate i’ve not tried that before i’m sure it will be useful depending on what you’re doing but we haven’t we’ve only used what we’ve what we have and we’ve been really happy with the wheelho just over the years so I hope that gives you some ideas tell me what you’re using in your garden i’m I’m really really open to finding new new tools these these two new tools that we got this week I’m really liking and we actually have one coming in the mail it’s called a carrot a carrot cultivator or a carrot hoe it is also a hand tool and it’s kind of weird it’s um it’s shaped like a circle so I’ll have to come back on that one and tell you what we think about that since that one was delayed from Amazon for some reason they weren’t bringing it to us at the same time that they brought these so I’ll just have to do like an addendum on that one when we when we get it to let you know until next time happy weeding weeding is like a necessary evil so we might as well use the tools that will make it easier for us and I’d love to know the things that you find that make it easier because yeah we all are here to help each other until next time stay safe be well and may God bless you happy gardening [Music]