John Henry, put down your hoe

5/31/04 | Video (8 MB) | Buy it online

Review by JEREMIAH McNICHOLS

The Beaver High-Wheel Garden Plow comes with three tool attachments — a double-pointed plow blade, a "left-turn shovel" and a five-tine cultivator. The steel wheel is 24 inches in diameter, and the apparatus is pushed around by a pair of 4 1/2-foot oak handles. I purchased one online in the hopes that it would help me deal with a large garden that had been disced a month prior, was partially planted and then grew a lot of weeds everywhere else. I like tools that are quiet, safe, and easy to use, repair, and adapt to changing needs.

The most striking thing about this plow is its relative simplicity of design. Tools attach to the plow stem with a single bolt and are easily interchanged without a hassle, and can easily be done in the garden without losing much steam — just bring a wrench out with your other tools and flip the plow over, bicycle-like, to switch the implement out when needed. This particular model comes with a single washer that is too small and too thin, so if you buy one through the mail, get yourself a half-dozen 1 1/2" x 5/8" washers, so you can get to work right away without delay when the tool arrives. My wife and I were able to put the plow together in around 45 minutes (it will take less time if you remember to attach the metal pieces to the handles from the wheel up, rather than from the top brace down) in spite of spare instructions and the inclusion of an old-fashioned steel-band wheel instead of the pneumatic tire shown in the assembly diagram. (I think ours was packaged with instructions for the Beaver M2, which appears to be different in only that respect.)

This tool may or may not meet your needs, depending on what you expect from the get-go. In heavy clay soils, you had better cultivate when weeds are small and soil moisture is plentiful, and even then you might find yourself pushing this tool beyond its capacity to serve. In our garden, the cultivating tool worked only after the ground had been tilled with a front-tine gas tiller I rented for a four-hour lurch through the hard-packed haven of weeds and field grasses. On its own, the cultivator struggled to get hold of the soil at all, let alone pull up weeds along the way. The plow blade did better, but cut such a narrow swath it was impractical for tilling our one-acre garden. Of course, if you're gardening in rich, loamy soil you have lucked into or built up yourself, the cultivator might work for you just fine. In our soil it was about as elegant as a mattock.

It was in the planting phase that the tool proved its real worth. The plow attachment could make a sloppy furrow in one quick pass, or a neat, deep furrow in two. The implement is double-bladed, with a longer, narrower blade at one end and a shorter, wider blade at the other. I found the deeper one was perfect for small transplants, and the wider one worked better for planting seeds. After seeding rows, the turn shovel implement will push dirt back into the furrow, leaving a slightly raised row and a shallow irrigation trench in its wake. All of this easily takes less than a quarter of the time needed to make the same progress with my other favorite option, a Warren hoe with a steel pipe for a handle, which adds weight and draws out rows with a simple pulling motion, rather than pulling it out from the side bit by bit with a standard field hoe.

But I have not given up on my high-wheel plow for cultivating between our garden rows, where the weeds are coming in so thickly they have elected representatives to the state government, and are calling for redistricting. The simple method of attaching implements has me hopeful of finding one, by the same or another manufacturer, that will fit and do that job right. (Earthway, another manufacturer of a high-wheel plow, sells a slicing hoe attachment that looks good.) And while putting up rows is clearly this plow's highest calling, it proved useful in other, unexpected ways.

Namely: In spite of countless cult-like assertions in the how-to gardening literature, uprooting weeds and turning them to the soil surface with tiller or hoe and leaving them to die is, at least in our garden, an Edenic fantasy that is trounced by the many rhizomous grasses that reroot and flourish as though reinvigorated by a deep-soil massage. To avoid such wasted effort, the conscientious gardener is faced with the confounding labor of going over the plot again before planting, raking or hoeing weeds up into little piles, sifting through the loosened soil and tossing the offenders out of the garden plot by the handful.

A high-wheel garden plow does a better job of this. Unless heavy rains are expected, wait a day or two and then head into the garden with your plow. The cultivator combs easily through the soil to a depth of three or four inches (adjustable, to a degree, by how high you hold the plow handles) and it is a simple and much less time-consuming task to walk your way through the garden plot, collecting the partially dried-out weeds that ball up under the palm of the five-fingered cultivator. If your passes are not too long, you can collect a whole row's worth of weeds in two smooth passes, dumping your weed load at each end of the run, then move on to a new channel and repeat. This takes time, too, to be sure, but not nearly as much. I estimate that it took me half an hour to comb through a 400-square-foot plot that had been pre-tilled with a gas tiller. With my previous rake-and-hoe method, it took two men an hour working together to do a similarly-sized plot, and cost us much more in human energy.

For hoeing, I have read that a low-wheel cultivator might work better, and for planting, a direct seeder could open up the ground, plant my seeds and close it back up. With the low-wheel cultivator's small wheel, the force exerted by the gardener is headed more directly towards the ground, where the implement is; the higher the axle, the higher the force is aimed, the more energy is lost, and the more the tool strains the back. Some low-wheel cultivators come with a plow, too. As for direct seeders, I'm not sure their "ground-opener" blade would cut into our soil as well as the high-wheel plow. Dropping seeds into the trench doesn't take long anyway.

Click here to see where we found the best price for our plow.