The hoe seems to be the most ancient and widespread farming tool. Wheel hoes are one giant step up the evolutionary ladder. They add comfortable handles and a wheel so that you can work faster and easier. Instead of clearing a little patch with every swipe of a hand hoe, you push a wheel hoe in one long smooth action to clear a whole strip of weeds. Once common on family farms and in vegetable patches, wheel hoes have faded into obscurity as fewer farmers worked larger and larger farms. But for those of us returning to small-scale, intensive agriculture, wheel hoes are a great example of appropriate technology.

Here at Molly’s Island Garden, the three of us (Molly, John, and myself, Anna) cultivate about three acres of row and bed crops. Wheel hoes are ideal for us because most of our plants are too close or too varied to cultivate with a tractor, and yet hand hoeing or weeding would take forever. John tried using a walk behind rototiller to destroy weeds, but found it to be noisy, hot, slow work. Although our rototiller is great for preparing soil, we’ve found that wheel hoes work better for weed control– and that’s just one of their uses. There are as many applications for wheel hoes as there are different types of hoes.

Most wheel hoes have a low front wheel, anywhere from ten to fifteen inches in diameter, and handles that attach to the frame behind the implement. Some have a high front wheel, around twenty four inches, with handles that attach at the wheel axis. My uncle Bob, who’s an engineer, pointed out that attaching the handle at the frame behind the implement meant the human force was applied to the implement rather than the wheel, making weeding less tiring and more effective. The high-wheel hoes are still manufactured (Earthway has a lightweight aluminum model) so they must work for some people, but they certainly don’t work in our lumpy ground. We’ve given away our high-wheel hoe and just looked for low-wheel hoes since.

All wheel hoes have detachable implements so that you could theoretically use one frame (handles and wheel) and just attach a different implement each time you needed to use it. However, we’ve found that we use three implements often enough that it’s easier to have a separate frame for each one. Our three favorites are the stirrup shaped blade, the furrower, and an adjustable tine cultivator. We’re hoping to put together a Planet Jr. seeder as well.

I use the stirrup implement to cultivate salad greens. Most of our greens are planted in one hundred foot rows about two and a half feet apart. John used to run a walk behind rototiller between the rows and then we’d weed the greens by hand. Since we usually have three plantings going at once, each one consisting of six to sixteen rows, this meant lots of work. We were never on top of weeding, and so we’d be picking greens surrounded by weeds that were twice as big. Now, with the wheel hoes, we start our weed control earlier, usually as soon as we see the first leaves of our greens.

I push the wheel hoe along either side of the greens and once down the aisle. The stirrup runs about one centimeter under the soil surface. This wipes out the first tiny weed seedlings and also destroys some germinated weed seeds that haven’t yet reached the surface. This is the most effective time to wheel hoe, because the weeds have the lowest survival rate. Also, when the salad greens are this small, I can get very, very close to the row. Sometimes the soil disturbed by the wheel hoe falls over the row of greens, but the plants are still small enough that they don’t mind pushing through a little more dirt. By the time the greens are ready to be thinned for our salad mix, the weeds that survived are getting pretty big, and another bloom of weeds is pushing up, so I wheel hoe one more time before picking. If we keep picking the greens for bunches, then I usually wheel hoe once more. We don’t hand weed at all.

Molly also uses the stirrup attachment to keep walkways weed free, between corn, beans, squash, lettuce, and onions. Here we do need to hand weed between the plants, but it’s much faster to weed the little strip of green that our wheel hoe leaves rather than the wider swath left by the rototiller. Our soils are loaded with weed seeds from years of sloppy weed control, so we still have to wheel hoe several times in the crop’s life. Since the stirrup only disturbs the top centimeter of soil, we don’t have to worry about bringing more weed seeds to the surface.
We use a Valley Oak wheel hoe and stirrup blade, and we’ve discovered that it’s important to keep the blade sharp and in shape. In our first year with the Valley Oak model, I tackled some three foot high stands of pigweed and managed to mangle a blade in two weeks. Once the blade becomes bowed, it moves roughly through the soil, cutting deeper in the center and shallower at the edges. We were more careful with the next blade, which has lasted four years so far. In good soil, we can cut down scattered weeds up to a foot tall, or thick weeds up to six inches– but it’s always easier and faster to get them when they’re smaller.

Our second favorite attachment is the furrower. It’s shaped like a little plow, and though it will cut through shallow sod and flip it over nicely, we mainly use it for making furrows or throwing up a line of dirt. It makes a furrow that is barely deep enough for potatoes, and perfect for peas, beans, and favas. After seeding, we run the wheel hoe alongside the newly planted row and it throws soil over the seeds.

I also use it when I put out row covers, landscape fabric, or plastic mulch. I make a furrow for the edge of the material and pin it down in the furrow with plastic spikes every three feet or so. Then I use the furrower to throw dirt over the edges to make it completely wind-proof. This complete seal is important for our radishes and carrots, because we have serious cabbage root maggot and carrot rustfly problems.

We have collected a variety of tine cultivators, but our favorite one has five tines in two rows which can each be moved or removed individually. We use the full complement in sandy soils, but for rougher ground, three usually suffice. Molly uses this wheel hoe to prepare ground for planting or transplanting. The tines are great for working in compost or other soil amendments, and they also disturb tiny weed seedlings. I’ve tried using the tine implement for weeding, like the stirrup one, but too many weeds just get pushed around the tines.

The Planet Jr. seeder is undoubtedly the best known wheel hoe, although with its two wheels, it doesn’t look like the others. We’ve put off buying a Planet Jr. seeder because the new models are rather expensive — I’ve seen them listed for more than five hundred dollars. However, there’s no way our Earthway can compare to the solid feel of a well balanced, well weighted wheel hoe. Unlike other wheel hoes, Planet Jr. seeders are in great demand, so we’ve had no luck finding one second hand locally. We’ve just picked up a bunch of parts at a farm auction, so we’re hoping to cobble together a seeder.

We’ve gotten the rest of our fleet through many sources: we bought our first wheel hoe at a local garage sale, another came to us from an uncle in Portland, and our best find, two wheel hoes and extra parts, came to us piece by piece via an ad that we placed in a senior newspaper in a neighboring county. A year after we placed the ad, a woman called saying she thought she had what we were looking for. When we picked it up, she was so inspired by our delight in the ancient wheel hoe that she continued searching her storage buildings and called us up twice more to say she’d found something useful. One of the hoes came without handles, so a local woodworker who also uses wheel hoes made a new set for us. We’ve only bought one wheel hoe new: our Valley Oak model. It has all the bells and whistles: an inflated tire that bounces over ruts and rocks, and padded handlebars that are just luxurious. If you’d rather spend cash than spend time fixing up an old wheel hoe, I know of at least two good makers– Valley Oak and Real– and I’m sure that there are a few more companies manufacturing new wheel hoes. However, we’ve had fun rehabilitating our second-hand hoes.

Age rather than manufacturer seems to determine whether or not a wheel hoe can swap parts. All of our “antique” wooden handled, thick metal wheel hoes are similar enough that handles, implements, and even tines can be swapped back and forth. Back when we still had our aluminum high-wheel model, we compared its implement to our other newer wheel hoe, the Valley Oak one, and concluded that with a little meddling, the two could probably share parts. However, we got so frustrated with the high-wheel hoe that we gave it away before we tried switching parts. The light weight of the newer aluminum hoes is nice, but I love that each of our old hoes shows the touches of other fiddling farmers: one has two different types of tines attached, one has a hand repaired handle brace, and one even has two different handles attached. We’ve added our own modifications: we shortened one set of handles, replaced bolts, even painted one hoe. It’s nice to know that in some future season, another farmer will be fiddling with the hoes I used, muttering, “Now how and why the heck did they do that?”

We love wheel hoes because they are:

Safe: It’s incredibly hard to run yourself over with a wheel hoe. Trust me, I’ve tried. You can use them barefoot, your volunteers or young employees can use them. Even your kids should have a hard time finding a way to injure themselves.

Efficient: Unlike rototillers, tractors, flamers, and infrared heaters,  wheel hoes run on human power instead of nonrenewable fossil fuels.

Inexpensive: Prices range from two hundred dollars for a new model to five dollars for a garage sale find.  Compare that to a new rototiller!

Flexible: Depending on the implement you choose, you can cultivate a width of an inch or a foot.  If the hoe gets stuck in a rut or if your row gets too narrow, just pick up a wheel hoe and move it.

Long lasting: Wheel hoes don’t break easily, and if they do, they’re so simple that just about anyone could repair them.  We’re using hoes older than us (and one of us is almost sixty).
                    -Anna Petersons