I give this knife 9 out of 10 acorns
I fell in love with
Truly Garden's Hori Hori Garden Knife the moment I saw a photo of one. This is exactly what I'd been looking for as my go-to tool to grab on the way to the garden. It's described as a garden knife, but it's basically a high quality, heavy duty, sharp, pointy garden trowel. So it can dig, plant, harvest and cut, all in one easy to carry hand tool.
The first thing I noticed when I unpacked it was the quality. I usually break garden trowels the first time I take them to the forest garden and expect them to do anything other than open up thoroughly loosened soil. This hori hori is different. The blade is really good thick, quality solid stainless steel, full tang with the steel extending all the way through the handle so the blade can't snap off the handle. The handle is hardwood, riveted to the steel. Plus there's a guard to stop your hand sliding down off the handle onto the blade when attempting to dig into rock hard ground, whcih I'm certain to do frequently. The whole thing just feels incredibly solid and sturdy, like it was designed to last a lifetime. It comes with a five year warranty, so I guess it was built to make sure they never have any sent back.
Let's take it for a walk around the garden to put it through its paces.
First, I stumbled on some ripe tangerines. It sliced through one like a pro!
Let's find something a bit tougher. That cabbage looks ready to pick, and I bet the stem is pretty thick.
Sliced though it like it was a piece of cake. I'm impressed!
While I'm here, I'll try it on some long grass that's running rampant and
feed it to the
chickens. It worked great for that, though if I was doing very much I'd probably use a sickle.
The old van is covered with lichen, which I love, but it's being taken away for scrap soon and I wanted to harvest some for experiments with natural dyeing. The hori-hori was absolutely perfect for this.
And now for a walk down to the forest garden to find some more exciting things.
It coped ok with trimming the smaller
water sprouts off the olive
trees, though again I think if I was planning on doing many I would take a machete or a pair of loppers with me. Olives might be tougher than most fruit trees though.
The soil in the forest garden is thin, hard and rocky, but the hori hori is perfect for digging up specimen plants for transplanting elsewhere. It would work just as well for digging out
dandelions if you were so inclined, though I prefer to leave them to grow.
I'd taken some chestnuts with me to plant. This was a very fast and easy job with the hori hori, just push the blade into the soil, push it back to open up a hole, drop the chestnut in and pat the soil back into place.
I'm sure it would be perfect for truffle hunting too. Unfortunately this was as close as I got on this morning's ramble through the woods.
An unexpected use was to use to give scale to photographs of interesting stuff I stumble on and want to photograph. After all, not everyone carries a banana with them everywhere they go...
All in all, this garden knife lived up to all hopes and expectations and has become a permanent feature of my home, hanging on a belt by my door ready to grab any time I set foot outside to go somewhere interesting.
One last thing, in case you were wondering, it also makes a great camping knife...