Tools: at-home land restoration
A romp through my favorite hand tools for sub/urban land management!
Today I want to share some of my favorite tools I use around my suburban yard. I hope to hear some of yours, too!
Buckets
There is no tool I use more than buckets - good for carrying, containing, measuring and storing various materials. I use ‘em to measure feedstocks for composting, as a vessel for compost extracts, and a basket for collecting weeds or trash. When I can’t be bothered to get a shovel, I’ll use my hands and a bucket as a scoop - works great! Oh and in a pinch, I flip them upside down with a heavy rock on top to protect plants during a freeze.
I have about 8 “spare” buckets that I can call on at a moment’s notice. This is probably excessive, but something about my tower of buckets makes me feel safe and prepared, like how a stocked pantry might ease someone else.
I end up using them all for bigger projects or when starting a new compost pile as I like to visually see the volume of my inputs before mixing them all together.
Since my buckets tend to come to project sites with me I thought, what the heck, let’s brand them with some Rhizos stickers - this way the [orange bucket company] doesn’t get free advertising and my buckets end up coming home with me.
Pro tip: when stacking buckets, place a rock at the bottom of each one before nesting the next - this ensures you can get them apart later 😅
Hori Hori Knife
When I first took the leap to develop Rhizos into a business, to make ends meet I worked part time for an all women’s landscaping crew and they required I have a hori hori knife for the job - I don’t think I’ve touched a traditional hand spade since!
The hori hori is truly the sharpest tool in the shed with a point at the tip, a serrated edge, and a slicing edge plus a little notch to cut right through a vine or stem. If that weren’t enough, it’s got a slight scoop shape to it and a useful measuring tool imprinted.
I use hori knives for planting, weeding, chopping up food scraps at the compost pile, the occasional hasty pruning (mostly for vines), measuring mulch depth and opening packaging of bagged soil n such.
I like to carry it on my person because it makes me feel like a badass and once again, promotes a sense of safety and security (self-defense is apparently part of its history!)
Pitchfork
An unexpected member of my favorites: the trusty pitchfork. I mostly use it around the compost pile - stabbing holes for aeration, turning on occasion, and sliding easily into heaps of woodchips and other feedstocks that would otherwise require more brute force if done with a shovel. I also like that it never has to be laying haphazardly on the ground, but rather can be stabbed upright somewhere waiting at attention.
In a pinch, a pitchfork can create openings in a soil for amendment applications - namely compost, biochar, or extracts around here. While a broadfork is also useful for this, I’ve yet to find my perfect match. I suspect the broadfork for me will be of the solid welded steel variety - on the wish list it awaits.
Hose-End Sprayer
I mostly use this to treat my city water with a little humic acid before watering plants or the compost pile. I also like lightly feeding my active (hot) piles humic and fulvic acids as it seems to significantly increase spore count in the final product!
While I don’t really like to feed microbial foods directly to the soil, plenty of people might find a hose-end sprayer useful for feeding kelp, humates, and other organic-based fertilizers!
(I prefer to raise microbes in compost and then introduce them to plants and let them take on the responsibility of caring for each other. I’m not saying that’s right, it’s just my current working philosophy!)
Tarps
Having seen many a gnarly shredded blue tarp, I was hesitant to use these hunks of plastic for fear they’d junk up my aesthetics (very important) and contaminate all my favorite things with microplastics. But, I’ve got to say if you get the heavy duty kind and respect their limits, they’ll hold up and be useful for all sorts of tasks!
I’ve learned the hard way that tarps really shouldn’t be left outside to store things long-term - nothing destroys a tarp like wind and sun… or being overzealous with a pitchfork (oops). Instead, they’re best used as a short-term holding center for compost feedstocks, prunings, or weeds which can easily be dragged or slung between two people for a quick move.
They also help protect areas where I don’t want to leave anything behind, making for quick clean up. Speaking of, I like that they can be hosed down, but few things stink worse than tarps that are stored wet, so don’t be hasty, let them air dry before folding them up for storage.
Naturally, my preferred color is brown as it blends in with all the soil-y things I’ve got goin’ on.
Pro Tip: I’ll sometimes pile larger tools onto a tarp to schlep them to my work site to make one trip of it.
Shears
This is by far the fanciest thing on my list of favorite tools; investing in a good pair of shears felt like a rite of passage. I opted for the extendable kind, and they’ve already gotten lots of use pruning plants, hacking back vines and chopping up all sorts of feedstocks in the compost pile.
If my compost is looking a little too chunky with large pieces of melons, avocado peels, large twigs n such, I just stab and chop chop chop. Not only is this very effective at helping the composting process along, but it’s also fun :)
There you have it, some trusted tools I use regularly in my suburban land management. Do you ever regard yourself as a land manager? It’s a nice perspective shift, really captures the responsibility and relationship we have with our particular patch of Earth.
What are some of your favorite outdoor tools?!
PS: My husband likens my bucket affection to that of the walrus memes, ha!
I enjoyed this very much and share in the appreciation for all of the above tools. I have a load of large black tree pots that I utilize for various tasks and love that they are free draining. Using cardboard as a kneeling pad is a standard for me too 👍🏼✨
I too have stacks of 5 gallon buckets, infinitely useful!! Im reminded of Eustace Conway, in Elizabeth Gilbert's excellent biographical "The Last American Man." Gilbert asks Conway, who is operating a primitive farm at Turtle Island, what modern convenience he can't live without. His response? The plastic 5-gallon bucket!!!