Hi folks, this is a beautiful rainy day in California
and I'm really excited to be able to share with you some really neat things that we're doing here.
And in the process of that I'm going to explain to you how to make a recycle hoe.
This is a special type of hoe which I recently developed
and which allows us to control weeds
in a situation like this in the background, without damaging the plastic.
You've probably heard of the phrase
"Necessity is a mother of invention", right?
Okay, so that phrase is a real important one. And what I want to do is I want to explain to you
what the necessity was in our situation here.
So down in the furrows of these strawberry beds there's a cover crop growing.
Those are not weeds. But those are cover crop plants growing there.
The reason we grow this cover crop is that it really helps
water to infiltrate into the soil and not run off. And that's really really important in our system
because we need that water to infiltrate down back into the soil and into our aquifer to recharge it.
We needed a way that we could control the weeds from the plastic edge
over to where the cover crop was growing.
We'd tried lots of different types of tools.
We'd tried hoes like this, which were pretty useless.
We'd also tried of stirrup hoes or hula hoes.
And these weren't very good.
They were very challenging to use and we often would cut the plastic even with this.
Now the only hoe that kind of worked was this one.
This is called a wire weeder or a wire hoe.
But it wasn't great.
And the reason it wasn't great was there's two things.
It's got a point on one end.
And that point is very easy to poke into the plastic and then cause damage the plastic.
And then also, it's asymmetrical.
Because it's asymmetrical it works very well on one side of the furrow but not the other side of the furrow.
I developed this new hoe design which I call the Recycle Hoe.
And let me explain to you the three parts of it that are critical.
So the first thing you're going to need is a large piece of grass.
Okay, so this is a piece of grass.
The grass is called Arundo.
And it's a very common and invasive weed here in California in certain areas.
And you're going to use this as our handle.
These make great handles.
For our blade
what we're going to use is a piece of this steel strapping.
So this is steel strapping that comes from hardware stores.
You don't have to buy it.
It's very springy.
This is what they throw away.
And I'm always looking in dumpsters for all kinds of goodies
and I've noticed this stuff for many years.
And after noticing it for many years I finally figured out a way to use it in our research program.
So this comes in different sizes.
This size is half inch.
This size is three quarters inch.
So we're going to use to make our blade.
It's a very, very sharp surface for cutting weeds.
Okay, so that's our blade.
And then to attach all this together
we're going to use a bicycle inner tube.
And this is one that means a lot to me because I ride a bike to work everyday pretty much.
And I go through a lot of tubes.
And in the process of all those tubes... I have a real hard time throwing tubes away because
tubes like this can be used for all different kinds of things.
And so I'd hung on to these tubes for years and years and I've got a big bag of them in my garage.
And I knew eventually I would probably come up with some way to use these that would be... real useful.
Now to save time
I took the handle the way it comes off the plant
and I already removed all this outside wrapping.
So here's one that's already ready to go.
This handle is about 8 feet tall.
I like a nice, long, tall handle like this because it allows me to reach way out
and control weeds without having a stoop over so much. So it's egonomically really good.
I also prepared for us two blades.
Let's start with this first blade.
So here's the blade and this is a two foot long section of that metal strapping.
And we're going to attach it with
these two pieces of rubber.
So this piece of rubber here, this is about a 6 inch long piece of rubber
To do this what you're going to a need to do is take your
piece of strapping, bend it in half like this.
Keep the tension in it like that.
Make sure it doesn't slap you in the face.
Slide it through the tube, like this. So that both ends come through the end of the tube
Okay, like that.
And then we're going to grab on to those two ends
and
pull it over the end of our handle.
Move it down about like that.
Now one thing that's kind of important is you don't want to have this sticking out so we will then
pull that back a little bit.
Pull this side back a little bit.
and then I like to get the...
I don't want the end... this part of the handle sticking out so I move it just like that.
Okay. Real simple so far right?
Now you take your two foot long section of
tubing that you cut from the same inner tube
and you start wrapping it.
Now I like to keep this wrap really, really tight
because I want to be able to go around it many many times.
Okay, so I'm wraping that
all the way down to the end here overlapping just slightly.
When I was a kid in Papua New Guinea we used a lot of
rubber tubing for making all kinds of things like slingshots and
spear guns and so I've always
enjoyed working with rubber tubing like this.
So now you get near the end. Well how you going to attach it?
Well, what I do
is I just bring it around like this. I hold my thumb underneath there
and then I slip
that part over the top of the
previous wrap.
And there you've got it, alright?
Now to make the hoe blade the right shape
just push it slightly.
And look at that. Isn't that beautiful?
You've got a sharp hoe right here folks.
This thing can slice through soil like a butter knife slices through butter.
And it's really, really effective.
Now, we're not just going to put one blade on our hoe. We're going to put two blades on there.
And were going to use the other size.
We're going to redo this again.
Okay so we've got our 6 inch piece of tube right here.
We're going to bend that in half.
Slide that right through the
center of our
piece of tubing.
Boy is it windy out here. We've gotten some nice rain today.
Pull it over the end
like this.
Okay?
Now remember I'm going to pull this little bit here back
so it's in line with...or a little bit inside of the tubing. Because I don't want to cut myself.
Okay, now get it just in line... the rubber tubing and the end of the shaft are in line on this side.
And then I take
my
rubber strapping and start wrapping.
[HIP HOP RAP MUSIC] And when we don't recycle it starts a downward spiral.
[MUSIC] It's about time that this goes viral...
[MUSIC] Recycling is turning old things to new things
[MUSIC] Saving energy while reducing pollution
[MUSIC] So when you get the chance go and break out the dance.
[MUSIC] Recycle Robot with all of your friends
[MUSIC] My Eco heros say it in sync
[MUSIC] Recycle, Reduce, Reuse, and Rethink !
[MUSIC] Recycling is turning old things.
Keeping it really tight as I go.
Now we're going to tie this one off.
Remember, put your thumb there, bring it around
get it underneath your thumb and pull it out, and there you go. You've got your second side of the hoe.
Now were going to push this down a little bit.
And there you go folks.
You've got a beautiful hoe right here with a three quarter inch blade on one side
a half inch blade on the other side.
and this can be very effective at controlling small weeds right down in these areas right near the plastic.
[MUSIC]
This handle here remember is made out of Arundo... that grass, which is widely available.
This stuff is lightweight right now, but as it dries it'll even get lighter.
It's not quite as strong as bamboo.
This is a Phylostachys nigra or black bamboo
which I grew at my house. This is a really nice type of bamboo because
it's extremely straight.
It's much tougher than Arundo. So I kind of think of these as two different models.
This is the one that has the lifetime warranty.
This is the one that's got probably a several year warranty. But eventually this one's going to crack.
It'll crack much more easily than than this bamboo would. The bamboo is just rock solid.
Now if you don't have access to either Arundo or any type of bamboo, you could also use a dowel like this.
This is some type of a hardwood dowel.
The challenge with dowels is it's very hard to find a dowel that's longer than about 6 feet, that's not a real big thick one.
And I like to have
some flexibility in that handle because
from what I've seen that makes the hoe actually work better.
It kind of keeps the tension on it as you're working it.
And that helps to cut the weeds better. So this can work.
What you may notice on this one is I actually attached this with some ring clamps.
And that was one of the initial designs I came up with.
And it worked fine. This is what we actually used for
hand weeding all of the furrows in the area behind me here.
I also made a few smaller versions
This is one that I can use in my home garden.
I've got some raised beds and I can just clean up the weeds there.
The metal strapping that I've found in the store.... this type.... the steel strapping..
this really is kind of a unique product.
Because what this is.. is it's extremely springing.
You know you bend it and it just bends back the way it was.
Now that's not quite the same with something like this. This is some galvanized, or actually stainless steel sheet metal.
When you bend this
it doesn't bounce right back.
And that's a bit of problem. So I would not recommend using
this type of material ,either stainless steel or galvanized. I don't think it's quite as good.
The other material that I've tried a little bit is this plastic strapping.
This does work on very small weeds
but it's not as good as steel strapping.
So this is what you find quite often in the hardware stores as well.
They use this for bringing in large loads of timber.
But what you really want is the steel strapping.
So one of the benefits obviously is that it's extremely inexpensive. You could make one for free basically.
It takes your time but it's fun to make.
It's very lightweight.
So because it's so lightweight it's going to make it easier to weed for a longer period. You're not going to feel as fatigued.
The flexibility.... I think I mentioned that. It helps to keep the pressure on the soil
and helps the hoe to kind of travel across the soil in a very aggressive way and really take out those weeds.
I really like that it's got two different size blades.
So one for smaller weeds maybe, and then for a little larger weeds here.
The flexible end, the blade part,
what's really nice is you can adjust this down to something like that and then adjust it back.
And you know what? If it breaks, it's easy to replace, right? It's not very hard to replace these.
So you can come up with all different types of shapes on the end. Whatever suits you best.
Now I have tried different designs for the blade like this one's kind of a neat one.
This is a serrated blade.
This could work for, maybe a little bit better for larger weeds.
Although to be honest
I don't really want the weeds to get that large that they need something like this.
And this would really do damage the plastic.
Sometimes when I'm out here working somebody will call me on my cell phone.
And I could actually continue weeding
with one hand
because it's so lightweight
and be talking away and still be getting some work done.
It always stays sharp. So that's a very important thing.
This hoe, the blade is so sharp that it just continually slices through the soil effectively
because there's very little resistance as that blade moves through the soil.
A lot of other hoes, the blade is quite a bit thicker than this.
This in my opinion is the best
hand weeding tool that we can use in our strawberry operation
and it will also work very nicely in our vegetable operation
where we need to get real tight
weed control right next to our lettuce or broccoli or whatever vegetables we're growing.
The only disadvantage I know of is...it's not great on really big weeds, but for the most part
we don't let weeds get big on our farm in our vegetable and strawberry systems.
Once they get big....than they're settings seeds. And we don't want that.
So quite honestly, we don't need a hoe that will handle large weeds.
We really just need one like this
that can handle small weeds, when they're really vulnerable, and easy to take out with the hoe.
There are some characteristics of this hoe which I think can help us remember a few things about our systems.
I like to take a long-term approach to our weed management, and the long handle
helps me remember that.
I like to be flexible in my a weed management system.
You always got to be flexible so that you can stay a little bit ahead of the weeds.
Kind of change what you doing if you need to.
And this flexible handle helps me to remember that.
I also like that this hoe is made of all recycled materials.
Because for me that really helps me to remember that
we need to recycle a lot more
in society as general but also on our farms.
And making your own hoe which you can use
to control your weeds, and making it out of all recycled materials
I think is a are really neat thing.
Anyway, I hope this has helped you to figure out how you can make your own recycle hoe.
I hope you enjoy making it.
You might even make some for people and give them to them as a present.
You might share this design with another farmer or another gardener so that they can also use it.
And I really hope that this can be used by people in many different areas regardless of their resources.
And I hope that it can help them with their weed control and their weed management.
Take care !