By Jacquie Foote These tools improved the way people gardened…
By Jacquie Foote These tools improved the way people gardened and improved the yield. When the most common way of planting garden seeds or bulbs…
By Jacquie Foote
These tools improved the way people gardened and improved the yield. When the most common way of planting garden seeds or bulbs (think onion) was simply to scatter them on the ground, think of the improvement in yield when a dibber was invented.
Specialized hoes made weeding work quicker, easier and more effective. The potato hoe was designed to hoe up potatoes without causing any wasteful damage, but not only potatoes, for at just 5 centimeters wide it was (and is) perfect for working in narrow rows where hoeing must be to be done with caution and in flowerbeds or in crowded vegetable plots where plants can be easily cut and ruined.
The onion hoe got its name because you could use it to weed between your onions with ease. In each case, the size and shape of the hoe blade enabled it to do its work.
Grubbers are built to get at deep-rooted weeds. The most popular in the old days was called the daisy grubber. The blade is narrow and forms a “V” shape to help it successfully pull up weeds such as daisies and dandelions. Being a hand tool, grubbers were (and are) made with a shaped wooden handle designed to fit comfortably in the hand.
Garden Claws are like long handled, heavy duty grubbers. They were (and are) used to cultivate, loosen and aerate as well as to remove weeds in all types of soil, even heavy clay. They were (and are) valued for cultivating around shrubs, bushes and other hard to reach areas.
Forcers are bell shaped pots with a lid covered opening at the top. Their use is encouraging the plant to grow early in the season. These days, they are mostly used to cover rhubarb to limit photosynthesis. They also are used to produce blanched stems. With rhubarb, the pots are placed over two to three-year-old rhubarb crowns during winter or very early spring. Once shoots appear, the lid is taken off, causing them to grow towards the light.
Most of the garden tools we have been describing are still available, especially from English gardening companies. The straightener is least likely to be found in a modern garden. It is simply a glass tube that was meant to be placed over young cucumbers or squash. It was invented in the 1850s by George Stephenson (who also happened to build the first public railway line in the world).
Apparently, Stephenson, who was fond of cucumber sandwiches, grew frustrated with the crookedness of the cucumbers growing in his gardens and had several glass cylinders made at his Newcastle steam engine factory in order to control the wayward vegetables. The idea took hold among those who liked their cucumbers straight (for slicing). Nowadays, of course, we have hybrid straight cucumbers and little need for glass tubes.
For information on the events at the Geauga County Historical Society’s Burton Century Village Museum, call 440-834-1492 or visit www.geauga
historical.org.
