A Hoe for All Seasons

Last year I bought a wheel hoe and it has become the workhorse of my garden. It has also made me rethink some of my gardening practices.

A wheel hoe is a gardening tool that works just like the name implies. You use it just like a garden hoe to cultivate the soil, remove weeds and form rows. But it’s attached to a wheel (or two wheels in some cases), which allows you to push it through the soil instead of swinging or chopping a long-handled hoe.

My wheel hoe, which I bought from Hoss Tools, can be used with several different attachments. I have a set of small cultivator blades, a set of “winged sweeps” and a plow set that can also be used to “hill up” crops like corn or potatoes.

Last week I needed to clean up our main vegetable garden. It only took about an hour to root-out all the weeds and grass that had grown throughout the garden. The hardest part was raking and removing that larger debris.

I used to apply a heavy layer of wood mulch throughout the garden.After transplanting, I’d spread wood mulch from the Fayette County Recycling Center around all my plants and over the walking paths. It works great to suppress weeds and hold moisture. But heavy wood mulch tends to clog up the wheel hoe. I’ve since switched to mulching with leaves. The leaves break down and become part of the soil much quicker. The wheel hoe can also pass through layers of leaves without difficulty. Leaves don’t suppress weeds as well as mulch. But the wheel hoe negates this problem. When weeds become an issue, I lightly run the wheel hoe through the garden and scrape away the weeds.

This is not a no-till method. But I think of it as minimaltillage. I’m only disturbing the top half-inch to inch of soil when I run it lightly through the garden. Some crops, like potatoes, require deep tillage to plant and harvest.

Growing crops like potatoes is where the wheel hoe really shines. With the plow attachment, I can cut a deep furrow in the soil and plant the seed potatoes. Then I can turn the plow set in the opposite configuration to “hill up” the soil. This configuration also works well for hilling up young corn plants, or any other crop that benefits from “hilling.”

You can arrange the wheel hoe attachments in a number of ways. I often set up the small cultivator blades to “straddle” a row of plants. This way, I can cultivate very close to the plants. I still have to come back and pick out weeds between the plants. But it saves a ton of labor. There are several companies that sell wheel hoes. I recommend the offerings from Hoss Tools. They offer several models – a single wheel, double wheel, and “high arch” double wheel. I think the double wheel model is the most versatile. They all comes with a set of small cultivator teeth, and I use these attachments the most. If you get one, you will find all sorts of uses for it. You can find them online at growhoss.com.