Hand Tools and Techniques for Home Landscaping

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To make trenching even faster, I like to run a tiller over the sod to be removed. The little hand-held Mantis tiller will dig up a strip of sod wide enough for the trenching shovels, getting soil penetration and extraction done in half the time.

For cutting heavy roots and hard soil you have a choice of implements that wasn't available until fairly recently. Several firms are distributing heavy-duty hand excavating tools with black iron or cast steel heads and hickory or ash handles. The castings have that rough, made in Taiwan look, but they are rugged and priced reasonably.

The traditional pickax with a pair of sharp points is of little use in most grubbin' I've tried them on. The points disappear into anything but rock hard sod. I prefer the landscaping grade pick-mattocks or pulaskis with a pair of flat-edged blades being sold for less than $40 by the homesteading catalogs. One of the 3" to 6" wide blades is parallel to the handle and the other is perpendicular to it. One blade will cut the root or dislodge the stone that the other won't. You can get fire fighters' pulaskis made from tempered steel by the ax manufactur ers. These are great for building or for timber fires but are too good to be used to grub in soil full of stones that will chip the steel.

You can also buy a variety of sizes in Italian grape hoes or grub hoes. With a single flat blade with a large open eye cast into the top for the handle, these are patterned after the all wood hoes used to work farmland since mankind first took up a settled agrarian existence. They are perfect for cultivating hard, rocky soil. But despite their apt name, I find grub hoes too broad for grubbing and angled wrong for cutting roots. The one that I had years ago was crudely cast and had an eye that was not shaped to hold the handle. No matter how I whittled, wedged, and pounded, it was always wobbly. I doubt that today's versions are so badly made.

The one wide-bladed tool that I do like for the scruffin' end of the job is a McLeod fire tool. Used by U.S. Forest Service fire jumpers and forest fire battlers around the world, this is a reasonably lightweight tool with a flat blade about 10" wide and 7" high. One edge is a hoe, the other is cut into wide rake teeth. A socket is welded or riveted to the middle of the tool and a stout 4' wood or fiberglass handle is bolted to that. It is handy to rake up soil or underbrush that is too tough or large for any conventional garden rake. Expensive at $55, but uniquely well designed, it is available from Bailey's.

Removing Roots

Once you've taken down a large tree, you may want to remove its stump or roots. My way is to grub out soil all around the roots then use a pair of 4' long steel pry bars from any building supply store to wiggle it around, and finally, to use a comealong to pull it out Then it has to be hauled out back to a brush pile. You can't chain saw it up, as the mots are full of stones that would eat a box of chains. It takes me all summer sometimes to do one. It makes more sense to leave it be and grind it down.

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