Clever Tools

Tools are important when you live on and tend a piece of land.  I've been interested in powerful, clever hand tools for a long time.

But tools can be much more than a hoe or a shovel.  One trigger to my concepts of tools for living a sustainable life goes back to meeting a copy of The Whole Earth Catalog for the first time, back in the early 1970's.  That was a exciting experience. I sat in a friend's place and read that copy for hours, absorbed.  If you're not familiar with the Whole Earth Catalog it was a large volume that devoted a couple of pages each to many different aspects of living and thinking.

 It provided an intelligently curated selection of tools in the widest sense, including books and good sources of information as well as actual tools and equipment.  Useful detail, pages, contacts were provided and   The catalogue was an education in itself but also an excellent guide to the best gear for an extensive range of activities. Looking back, it was a antecedent of the internet. Steve Jobs said, ""When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation.... It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic and overflowing with neat tools and great notions."  If you're curious you can see some samples here:  Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools and Ideas

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My bookshelves still contain books bought from reading of them in the Whole Earth Catalogue.  The fact I was working in a university bookshop at the time helped! Books are seminal tools of course, and I have personally gained much from acquiring and reading key texts on gardening and farming in "organic" modes.  These days the text is likely to be an ebook as much as  an actual volume but it is still a deep truth for me that sharing the experience, knowledge and wisdom of other people from around the world is a joy.  I hope to share some of the books and sources that I have found valuable through this blog.

For now, let's go back to hand tools.  You know, you can do lots of things with simple, basic tools. My father was a gardener ( he was a market gardener for many years and I grew up on that market garden in Heathcote Valley, near Christchurch) and his favourite tool was a push hoe that had been used and sharpened so much the blade was only 8 or 10 cms  long.  Here is an example of a push hoe to make sure you know what I'm referring to.

 That tool was used for weeding and light cultivating all around his garden.  In the 1970's I spent a year working as a jobbing gardener in Christchurch, visiting both grand and humble gardens and keeping things looking good.  The tool I used mostly was that same type of push hoe and I learned to use it in different ways, sometimes turning it over and using the blade at an angle to shape beds into neat mounds and curves.

Because I started my "back to the land' action as gardener in city sections, I have always valued  good hand tools.  Since I've had a wider scope here on the Pear Tree Ridge farm I've used larger equipment but my fascination with small scale tools remains.  The best of them are effective and satisfying to use.  Their origins are often traditional, reflecting practical design by people who used them in their work.  Other examples are more recent but still are the result of people who apply their experience to develop a better way to do a job.  I've imported a number of hand tools that are not easily available here in New Zealand, usually from the United States, and I'd like to share my thoughts on some of those in a series of posts.