When you choose your hoe blade width consider your use/strength. It's only in the really tough stuff that a mattock shines.Īs a bonus, you can smooth and tamp with a hoe in a way you can't with a mattock. You can actually do a decent amount of chopping/breaking up with a good hoe (which feels very different from a light garden how). The handle is also usually longer so it's a better angle for the type of digging you're doing while trail building. The blade is wider and more conducive to dragging volumes of dirt. If the ground isn't super hard, I'd actually much prefer to dig with a good, heavy hoe (like a Rogue hoe). Not a problem if you're digging out honeysuckle bushes or breaking up shale (as you can't do much volume anyway), but digging with a mattock in soft soil is going to feel really slow/excessively laborious. On the other hand, the hoe blade isn't very big, so it's not going to move a high volume of dirt. The axe side was good for big roots, but the more hoe like side took care of most of them. They were great for cutting through our hard ground, prying up shale, etc. Get one of these, add a new hickory handle to it, and you’re good to go for at least a few more decades.The mattocks I grew up using had smaller, heavier heads than hoes. You can find new versions on the internet from $18 to $34 dollars, but you can also find one, or maybe just the head for one, in antique shops, junk stores, or farm auctions. Mine may have been a government-issue tool from some branch of the military, circa WWII, when it might have been helpful in digging foxholes. I keep mine sharpened, which makes weed-chopping a little easier, but that really doesn’t matter much. I also use it as my prime gardening tool in my rich, loose-and-fluffy home-made garden soil to create holes and furrows and to chop weeds out by the root. It’s great for digging a planting hole out of virgin sod where you expect to encounter rocks, glass shards, or other sharp nasties. Mine came to me as a gift a long, long time ago, and I’ve used it for so many things I’ve lost count of them all, but I use it primarily for gardening efforts. In this case, though, I’m talking about a shorter handle, and a lighter mattock, making for a one-handed garden tool. The mattock is typically affixed to a long handle. Every gardener is familiar with the mattock, whether it’s an adze mattock which that features an adze in combination with an axe, or a pick mattock which has a pick on the opposite side of the tool. We refer to the same blade configuration, that is, a blade installed at a right-angle to the handle, as a mattock when the blade is duller and intended for chopping into the earth. A short-handled adze is called a hand adze, because you swing it with your hand, and a long-handled adze is referred to as a foot adze because if you aren’t using it carefully, you’ll chop off your foot. It has, for the most part been replaced by mechanized woodworking tools. Today, the adze is a sharp tool that’s used in rough carpentry. It’s obvious that one of the first tools early man would invent was something to dig with that was a bit more finger-friendly. Imagine our prehistoric ancestor digging with his hands into the dirt, he points his fingers perpendicular to his hand and scoops out a handful of dirt, and along with it maybe a few sharp stones, a thorn or two, or perhaps a splinter slides under a fingernail. It was invented about the first time someone tied a rock to a stick, which you can figure was quite a while back. The adze is among the very oldest of stone-age tools.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |