Some years ago, when we first had our allotment, we dug and hoed by hand, until the inevitable second-hand cultivator arrived. It was a nice little beast, quite powerful, and did a lot of hard work, until one day, for no reason, it just stopped in mid-cult and refused to start. It never did start again, despite all sorts of investigation, and we moved on from our plot to spend more time working on our new house.
I sold the old chap somewhat reluctantly, but time moves on when there are more urgent matters to attend to, like tending to a growing family, and trying to make a living.
The same family have grown up and moved on, and our thoughts returned to the days when we could grow much more on our old plot, and eventually we bit the bullet, and went to see the Parish Clerk, who is a friend, and also runs the plots in the village.
We walked the paths between rather dilapidated plots, and he checked each one off on a list, moaning about this one, laughing at that one and so on, until we stopped by a dense shrubbery of weeds and couch grass, which was well forested with some of the biggest docks I’d ever seen!
He said shortly, ‘Could you clean this one up’?
It took me all of half a second to say ‘yes’, because it was our very first allotment, and completely neglected and covered in rubbish and debris. Well I had to say ‘yes’ didn’t I!
And so a few days later, we started to clear the weeds, and dig out every single tangle of couch grass by hand, because it really had been left in a state of near non-redemption. The job’s been done now after way over fifty hours of digging and cleaning, and forty barrows of couch and rubbish, and the first veg are in.
It was inevitable that I’d start to look at the occasional cultivator on Ebay, or peer enviously at some of the chaps puttering their Hondas around their plots, but those machines wouldn’t have extracted the couch grass properly anyway, and after all, I wanted the exercise! However, the Terrex spade did all the hard work, and I made do with that, and a few other implements.
Back in 1988, I’d kept an old Marshalls Seed Catalogue, tucked into the notebook I used to jot down planting times etc. It opened on a page which, by coincidence, showed an advert for Mrs Growster’s new secateurs, and, joy of joys, there was another picture of a 'Jaylo Wheel Hoe'!
Now, years ago, I’d long spent ages trying to design and make a hand cultivator with a wheel or two, actually trying to think through the operation before I knew you could actually buy one in the shops! Pensions don’t run to buying the American designs, and a powered rotavator is also out of the question, so it was a short hop to the shed to start to build my own wheel hoe.
Somehow, I’d managed to keep the old handles from our old Webb Wasp mower. They were in the roof actually – don’t ask why, and of course, that was a start! The internet provided countless images of shiny blades, bolts and wheels from flashy sports cars, which made up the big American models, but there was also a bewildering collection of locally forged wheel hoes, and the designs could easily be altered and made to fit what I already had, which was an old wheel-barrow wheel, (found in the woods), and a couple of pieces of old oak, from the old church notice board, (there was a new one built, and they were going to burn the old 5” x 5” posts!)
I’d always collected other bits and pieces, and as we didn’t cycle very much now, I used the old car bike bars as a frame for the wheel, and also the hoe blade, which started out as a piece of 1/8” flat steel, and was gradually altered to include a thinner, sharper blade, 5” wide.
The whole lot actually screws or bolts together, and the only standard item is the handlebar extensions from my bicycle, because the old lawnmower handles are at the wrong angle to push the hoe properly.
It is an absolute joy to use. All those American Old-Timers knew a thing or two when they made these for their own small-holdings, and after a few running adjustments, I can now get the thing working through the whole 3.5 rod plot in about twenty minutes, and it is nearly effortless! You can push/pull if you want, direct it through gaps in the rows easily, and it stops immediately of course…!
And it costs absolutely nothing to run!
What is amazing though, is the fact that there are very few places where you can get one of these marvellous tools in the UK, I’ve tried many shops, auction houses etc., but not come up with anything like the old 'Jaylo', whose picture fell out of a grubby old notebook with 1988 written on the cover…
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May 15, 2013, 16:07