LIVING THE DREAM FOR A DOLLAR AN ACRE
(Page 7 of 9)
The Mantis works best when worked gently backwards, against
the forward momentum of its tiller blades. It is most
effective milling up already prepared soil to two-inch to
three-inch depths, but given time, can get down a foot or
more into fresh sod — deeper than any full-size
rotary tiller. We applauded the Mantis in an earlier
article, so we will merely add that this is one tiller that
anyone really can operate with just one hand.
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As with the DR, there are other makes of small
tiller-cultivators and most of them function well. Some are
copies of the Mantis design, and some have been around for
decades — far longer than Mantis itself. We hope to
test a few in issues to come, but we think we owe our
respect to the little Pennsylvania mail-order firm that had
the gumption to invest in the engineering to produce a
superior product and that had the marketing vision to make
us aware of the usefulness of a mini-tiller in the first
place.
Return of the Wheel Hoe
If you do have a garden that can be measured in fractional
acres, you are running a de facto truck garden and will be
cultivating more soil than a hoe or a Mantis can handle.
To break ground you'll surely want a small tractor or big
tiller. But for less power-intensive small farming chores,
we are pleased to note the reappearance of hand-pushed
wheel hoes. Designed originally in the horse-farming days,
they were sized to cultivate plots that were too big for
hand-hoeing and too small or closely-planted to warrant
harnessing the horse and setting up the cultivator.
The wheel hoe is patterned on the old-time horse-drawn
cultivator. In some places a pony, a wether goat, or even a
large dog is single-tree harnessed to the frame and trained
to ease the work load. The tool features a pair of
plow-handles leading down to a mini-draw push bar, to which
you can attach a small moldboard plow, disks, or arrays of
several kinds of cultivators: hilling plows, spades,
spikes, hooks and more. A wheel — either a yard-high
bicycle-spoked wheel (in the high-wheeled Kentucky design),
or a six-inch to eighteen-inch diameter wheel with iron rim
and spokes, or a solid-steel rubber-tired wheel (in the
original Planet Junior low-wheel pattern) — is out in
front of the tools and hung to keep the frame just off the
soil while the tools bite as deep as you like.
Without the help of a beast, you adjust the tools on the
bar to plow or disk one or two furrows or to cultivate
between as many rows as possible. You try to accomplish, in
a single pass, as much as is reasonable with your own
muscles. In most soils, you must dig the tools) in and roll
the wheel hoe forward, then pull it back on the wheel and
push forward again as far as you can manage. An acre or two
of this constant back-and-forth labor does build up your
back, shoulders, and arms.
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