Wheel Hoe Review - Old Book, Timeless Wisdom
While on an online gardening forum recently, I was reading an exchange between two people who were posting their personal wheel hoe review and commenting on the utility of the Wheel Hoe. One of them was criticizing the Wheel Hoe as an outdated piece of equipment that was "too much work," while the other was explaining the benefits of using a Wheel Hoe in their garden. While using personal experience for support, the Wheel Hoe proponent also posted a wheel hoe review which included couple of paragraphs directly quoted from a book published in 1917 titled "Around the Year in the Garden" by Frederick Frye Rockwell. When I read these quotes, I knew I had to find this book!
I did some rigorous online searching and found only two original copies of the book, and purchased both. The photo above is one of the copies and the other has a blue cover with the same cover artwork. The book is written in a diary format and details the author's year around his garden and farm. He describes every process from preparation, planting, harvesting, and what to do during those dreary winter months.
The photo above from the book shows a Double Wheel Hoe being used with Plow attachments to create a furrow for planting potatoes. Once potatoes are planted, the Plow attachments can be turned outward and the Double Wheel Hoe will cover and hill the planted potatoes. When speaking about what tools a gardener should have, he says:
"Even the smallest gardens should have a wheel hoe in its tool outfit ... As it is a machine that you will probably use in the garden more than all your other tools put together, be sure to get one capable of doing all the work you may have to give it."
We couldn't agree more with this wheel hoe review more! The Wheel Hoe is just as useful today as it was 100 years ago. And with all the Attachments that we have available, you can be sure that it will cover all of your gardening needs from cultivating, furrowing, planting, hilling and weeding. Rockwell goes on to talk about using a Double Wheel Hoe versus a Single Wheel Hoe. This is a frequent question we receive from people wondering which Wheel Hoe suits them best. Rockwell explains it perfectly:
"The double-wheel hoe has a distinct advantage over the single-wheel in that the rows can be straddled, permitting very close work while the plants are small and accordingly cutting down the laborious task of hand weeding. If your garden is at all large the amount of time you will save in weeding it the first time with a double-wheel hoe instead of with a single wheel hoe will make you satisfied with the slight additional investment."
He then talks about maybe the most important attachment of all, the Seeder or "seed drill" (pictured above) as he calls it. In a complete paragraph, he insists:
"By all means get a wheel hoe with a seed-drill combination. Life is too short, garden space is too valuable, the work of thinning plants and cultivating uneven rows is too costly, to justify anyone's planting a garden by hand. When you can mark the row, open the furrow, drop the seed, cover it, roll it, and get it straight, in one operation, as fast as you can walk, the laborious task of hand-sowing seeds like onions, carrots, beets or turnips is out of the question. In addition to doing the job better and infinitely faster, covering all the seeds with fresh earth and dropping them at uniform depth, the seed drill leaves the row neatly rolled on top, so that you can see where to cultivate before the plants are up."
We couldn't have said it better ourselves. The Seeder attachment for the Wheel Hoe will perhaps save you more time than any other attachment because it is able to perform so many operations in one pass of walking down the row. As evidenced by the wheel hoe review in this book and our continued use, the Wheel Hoe is a time tested piece of equipment that is a must-have item for everybody from the small backyard gardener to the market farmer. With the Seeder and other attachments you can prepare, plant, weed and maintain your garden with the Hoss Wheel Hoe. Our Wheel Hoe is MADE IN THE USA and built to last. Here's to 100 more years of Wheel Hoe gardening!