Getting To Know My Hoe

This post is my RSVP to Carol of May Dreams Gardens' "Garden Bloggers Hoe Down".

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I have a confession to make. I'm not a hoer. Oops. That doesn't look right and it sure doesn't sound right when you say it out loud, so let me rephrase that. I don't use a hoe. Carol is shocked, I know, but I've never really felt the need for one. Why use a hoe?

I know there are a couple of good reasons - to aerate the soil around plants and to remove weeds. I don't have a weed problem since I use mulch everywhere except the vegetable gardens, and we use Preen there, prior to planting the veggie seeds. But cultivating the soil might be reason enough for me to think about hoeing.

Now that I do think about it, I've used a different garden tool to accomplish the cultivation task. It's a long-handled forky thing.

I know it has a proper name - something like a "4-tined cultivator" - but I just call it a forky thing. I've got a short-handled one, too. These come in really handy also when I want to plant something and the soil is really too wet for it. They let me dig a hole without compacting the wet soil.


We have an old hoe that I have no idea where it came from. It might be an old one passed down to me by my parents. I'll have to ask them. Romie uses it once in awhile between the corn rows throughout the growing season.


But this past Christmas, my mom gave me a Winged Weeder. I haven't used it yet, so it still looks brand spanking new. In fact, I had to take off the packaging to take photos of it for this blog post.


It's shaped in such a way that it actually looks like it might be fun to use. Maybe I'll try it. Maybe I'll even like it enough to keep using it.