Everything You Need to Know About Gardening Hoes

Everything You Need to Know About Gardening Hoes

If you are passionate about gardening, you must be looking for ways to keep off the weeds. Gardening hoes are special tools in this regard. Using a suitable garden hoe not only helps to get rid of the weeds, but facilitates sowing seeds and cultivating the soil simultaneously. Whether you are a home gardener or an owner of a nursery, gardening hoes help to keep the weeds down in your garden. These tools shape the soil and often come with heavy, broad blade with a straight edge called grubs. They are popular for more than a decade and most of the gardeners use these tools for their everyday gardening activities. Now the question is whether you are having the right garden hoe? How will you know which one will suit the best for your soil and vegetation? Moreover, what are the best ways of using and maintaining these tools? Let’s find out all the answers from this blog:

• Choosing the right hoe

First of all, you need to choose the right garden hoe. Various types are available in the market. However, you should not get confused in making the right selection from the myriads of tools. Traditional long handled hoes are usually preferred for removing the weeds of vegetable gardens. These are used for hauling up an area in order to sow squash seeds. They are also good for harvesting root crops, clearing the soil and shaping the flower beds.  Sometimes, you need the extra reach for creating narrow furrows for planting seeds and bulbs. The hoes with long handles perfectly match your requirement in this respect. The long handle hoes are also called draw hoes and they come with blades set at right angle to the handles to help the gardeners chop into the ground and pull blades towards them. If you want to chop the roots and dig in the dirt for your small garden, you can opt for four to six inches wide blades of this gardening tool. In case, you change the angle of the handle of this tool, you can dig several inches deeper or shallowly into the soil while pulling the hoe. Normally, the draw hoe is available with a typical eye design with a ring in the head through which the handle is built-in.

Besides, you may use scuffle hoes for cutting and removing roots and disrupting the growth of weeds efficiently. You can mostly get them in Dutch and hoop designs. Hoop hoes are also famous as swivel, hula or oscillating tools and consist of double-edge blades to form a rectangle attached to the handle. If you buy this tool, you can cut weeds, just beneath the soil surface. This is because the blades can be pushed and pulled all over the space. The backward and forward motion helps to cut weeds in loose soil. You will get the blades within three to seven inches of width. The head of this tool is created by a loop of flat and sharpened strap metal. Nevertheless, if you want to move soil, this tool will not be effective as a draw hoe.

• Using & maintaining garden hoe

Whatever tools you may select, it’s essential for all the gardeners to clean and sharpen the equipment. You will enjoy the benefits of the gardening hoes for a long time, if you maintain them in a proper way.  A garden hoe will provide you better efficacy, if you get rid of the dirt after using it. Besides, if you are having clay soil in your garden, you can use wire-bristle brush for cleaning. Once you remove the dirt with water from your garden hose, use a rag to make the hoe dry. You can then apply a coat of recycled lawn mower oil to the blade of the hoe for preventing rust. However, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the cleaned and the oiled hoes will never rust and this could be hazardous for every gardening tool used in soil. So what’s the solution you will seek in this regard? The best way out will be to use a diamond file tool for eliminating the rust particles. Furthermore, you can sharpen the blades of the tools through the coarse hand file, grinding tool drill and sharpening stone.

Opt for the best gardening hoes (http://gardening.about.com/od/toolschool/tp/Garden_Hoes.htm) matching your requirement, prevent the growth of the weeds and smarten up your garden in a perfect way. Weigh up all the pros and cons of before purchasing any garden tool like spitting axe, sickle, weeding tool, etc. This would help you to choose the right one and lessen your hard work for removing weeds and cultivating your garden.