The lengthening daylight is now imperceptible. A month ago when I got home from teaching, there was barely enough twilight to do anything outside. However, now I find that I can see easily until about 6:15 pm, giving me almost an hour of time gardening in the evenings.
My recent task has been cleaning out the vegetable garden for the coming peas and potatoes. The freeze that hit over the holidays while I was gone was severe, enough to tank the broccoli, mustard, and Swiss chard that I’m usually continuing to harvest. By now, the mustards are usually bolting to provide some early season nectar for insects, but they’ve just turned to mush. I’ve learned my lesson for next year. I’ll cover plants with floating row cover before traveling for the holidays.
The biggest surprise is that the soil is fairly clean of weeds, even more so than it has been in the past few years. It’s not because I used my leaf mold mulch; no, I’m saving that precious resource for the tomatoes in the spring.
I credit the practice of using the wire hoe. This ingenious tool was my favorite discovery of 2021. It features a long wooden handle that holds a thin piece of wire bent into a triangle and attached to a hex head insert, much like the head one would use in an interchangeable cordless drill. There are four sizes of these triangles from roughly 8 inches wide to barely over 2 inches that can be changed out based on plant spacing.
Wire weeding is a pleasant task in the garden. Doing it regularly beats hand pulling all those weeds.
The wire is not sharpened. No, the strategy here is to get weeds while they are mere threads through shallow cultivation, perhaps only disturbing the top 1/2–1 inch of soil. It’s almost like sweeping the garden of weeds, much like one would sweep the kitchen regularly to get the crumbs up from making dinner. If weeds are controlled early in the first several weeks of plant growth, the plants will typically then cast enough shade to discourage other weed growth.
It is incredibly pleasant to use. The handle is long enough to allow the user to stand up straight with both thumbs facing upward and weeding the garden. I was amazed years ago when reading Eliot Coleman in The New Organic Grower write about the four thumb positions on a handle while weeding. I mean, who thinks about these things? But, such a consideration has a big impact on the ergonomics of the tool. Both thumbs out or both thumbs in don’t make much sense, so I won’t discuss those. Both thumbs down toward the blade is horrible on the back and how most gardeners have to hold a common hoe to actually cultivate the soil due to the head length and angle. Both thumbs up away from the blade is how one wants to hold a handle to be to minimize back issues, and the wire hoe allows for this position.
I made it the first task in the garden, and in 15 to 20 minutes I could weed over 700 square feet by shallowly cultivating the top layer of the soil. They key is not digging deep; it is actually better because that will reduce the number of new weed seeds brought to the surface. I had students use this tool on campus last fall, and it did a good job of keeping the beds clean of weeds as well where they used it. You can use it in perennial beds, too, but I find that Roy Diblik’s Dewit diamond hoe works better.
The design of the wire hoe is so simple.
Working with this hoe has given me that this-tool-is-so-simple-I-could-have-created-it-and-been-a-millionaire feeling. But, it was the brain child of aforementioned Eliot Coleman. On the episode of the Winter Growers podcast (1:01:30), Eliot notes how he was first inspired by Michael Fitzpatrick who said that his favorite tool was this little hand held device that had wires on it for cultivating in the greenhouse. He went back and made a version that could be attached to a long handle using a bolt you screw onto the handle. Conor Crickmore then took the design and put hex head inserts on the wires and ran with it making several versions of the wire hoe. And, really it has been Conor who has helped popularize it and get it into mainstream horticulture.
You’ll note earlier I didn’t just say that it was the wire hoe but the practice of using the tool. The key to weeding in the vegetable garden is developing it into a routine to see results. It becomes something you do frequently, every day or a few times a week. Seth Godin shared Elizabeth King’s quote in the front of his book The Practice, “Process saves us from the poverty of our intentions.” And, wire weeding has saved me from a wealth of weeds.