A Short History of the Garden Hoe

Hoeing the garden is both wonderful and awful for me.  On the one hand, it clears a lot of space in a short time without compacting the soil too much.  On the other hand, it makes me feel like a pathetic weakling: I have short arms, so it's difficult for me to position myself to use it without quickly becoming exhausted.  This is ridiculous, because hoeing is apparently one of the things that Jane Edna Hunter was doing for thirty cents a day on this very property in the 1890s, when she was in her early teens.

Nonetheless, the hoe is awesome.

 Sorry, plow, but at this scale, you just don't compare.

The invention of the hoe, a simple but highly efficient tool, is said to have taken place in the fifth century BC, but the kings of the Chinese Zhou dynasty were issuing coins in the shape of miniature bronze hoes (since bronze tools were a common medium of exchange) a century earlier (source).  They're also mentioned in the Book of Isaiah in about 8000 BCE, but this may be an artifact of translation.  The oldest one I can find photographs of is a Roman sarculum from 2000 BCE (see photos in the collection of Smith College here).

If you don't have a hoe, you have to do it like this.  And yes, that's me (Chelsea).

The simple hoe, with a flat edge and a wide blade, is called a Dego hoe, but no one seems to know why (if you do, please leave me a comment to let me know!).  The long handle of the typical hoe is a necessity; in fact, a 1975 decision by the California Supreme Court banned short-handled hoes from use in agriculture because of the crippling back injuries they can cause laborers (source).  Those involved in that decision saw short hoes as a way to keep Mexican field workers living humble, stooped-over lives.  I have the urge to sort through our collection of period photos of Woodburn to see what length of hoe the sharecroppers there were using, but I don't think we have any agricultural photos.  I'll check.

The hoe is also responsible for one of those quintessential colonial American dishes: the hoecake.  Hoecakes are made from cornmeal and were a staple food of early American colonizers "from Newfoundland to Jamaica" (Wikipedia).  Supposedly they're called johnny cakes if you go a bit further Yankee-ward, but I'm not sure I believe this, since the term "johnny cake" was recorded in 1739 as the name that South Carolinian African-Americans used to refer to a Native American baked cornmeal cake -- and the Haw Branch Plantation cookbook records it as being called a hoe cake in Virginia.  These were probably eaten by the tenant farmers at Woodburn; you can achieve the same effect with this recipe from Hillbilly Housewife.

Happy hoeing!

Wildlife at Woodburn: Snakes, Swallowtails, and Skinks

One of our secondary goals of the herb garden at Woodburn is to make it relatively wildlife-friendly, so we were delighted at the end of April to see quite a few little friends in the garden area!

First off was this handsome fellow, who is working on a nice cocoon on the side of our wren house:

 

A bit of Googling (this is a useful site, but not complete; we found it here) reveals the little dude to be a black swallowtail, Papilio polyxenes.  We're well within the Eastern black swallowtail's large native range.  He was probably attracted by our pesticide-free and insanely fluffy fennel; they're also called parsley worms, since they feed on plants in the carrot family (including parsley, fennel, and dill).  While we'd like some wrens to live in the wren house one day, we're only too happy for him to camp out here while it's going spare, so we'll leave him be and see if he continues to spin.

More after the jump, but warning for those squeamish about reptiles:

Gardening Report: Hoeing, Oh God So Many Gladiolus, and ... Tomatoes?

I must regretfully report that the race against time has been lost to gladiolus.

Note: Since this is my first Gardening Report post, I was seriously contemplating backdating posts to fill in since last February ... but then I realized that they would all read, "We pulled weeds, fought mightily against the oregano, and moved gladiolus.  The end," and it just wouldn't be interesting.  So we'll start last Thursday, a stormy Thursday toward the end of April, and work our way up from here.

 A pretty moment around 3:00, sandwiched between thunderstorms.  Ah, the early Southern summer.

Also, as of a couple of weeks ago, I am fully prepared to declare the hoe to be the most important invention of mankind short of the laptop computer.  But more on this later.  Back to gladiolus.

Woodburn's garden is absolutely filled with heirloom gladiolus (gladioli? ... glads).  At some point, someone seems to have planted them along the southern border of the garden, and they have now mounted a hostile takeover.  In my experience, gladiolus don't flower unless they're extremely happy with their location, but when they are ... ohhh brother.

On the upside, gladiolus are an absolutely stunning tall element in a summer garden.  

On the downside, they don't belong in this one.

The time to transplant gladiolus is after they've flowered.  However, if we'd waited that long, we wouldn't have been able to see the garden for the gladiolus, so we've been digging them and moving them to the edges.  Since these flowers get insanely tall (though heirloom glads are shorter than hybrids, some of ours are looking me in the eye already), we'd like them to serve as a border to stop people treading on the plants.  Transplanting the gladiolus is a tedious process, because it involves disentangling the corms (roots) from one another and from the roots of the crabgrass that has also moved in.  It also means that they probably won't grow again until next year, since gladiolus don't like to be disturbed after they've put up leaves.

If they've put up not just leaves but flowers, however, moving the glads can kill them.  It takes a lot of energy for bulbs (and corms) to flower, and they need the photosynthesis time afterward to build up energy for next year's flowers.

Sometime in the first half of April when M and I were horribly ill, they've flowered.  We have lost this battle for time.  But we will win the war ... when they're done flowering.

Scores for 4/27/12

Heirloom Tomatoes Planted: 3
Other Plants Planted: 5
Types of Seeds Planted: 4
Wheelbarrows Added to Compost: 1
Wheelbarrows of Soil Returned to Garden: 1
Horribly Painful Thorny Weeds Grasped: 3
Tree Saplings Removed: 4

Things on the To-Do List Now:

- plant the seeds currently cold-stratifying in the refrigerator
- plant the foxglove, thimbleweed, chamomile, and catnip seeds
- prune the fennel again
- continue policing for oak saplings
- moisten the compost heap
- plant marigolds near the tomatoes
- build tomato cages out of sticks

Things to Be Done at Some Point which Is Not Now:

- move the rest of the glads
- dig the pond
- do something about the brick path sliding down the hill

More photos and tales of seeding, including the question of why on earth we're planting tomatoes, after the jump!

How it All Began

"Who's in charge of the herb garden?" I idly asked our volunteer director, E.  It was a ridiculously cold day in February, and my partner and I were shivering under fleece hats and winter coats behind the gift shop table.  A few yards down Woodburn's long, sloping lawn, a reenactor was telling Gullah folk tales; to her right, an enthusiastic quilter chatted with customers about her techniques.  Another reenactor's voice boomed inside the historic cabin.  It was the Pendleton Historic Foundation's annual African-American Heritage Day at Woodburn Plantation (which isn't actually a plantation), and it was early enough in the year that I could still look at a 15-by-15 patch of scrub and think there might actually be someone in charge of it.

 But hey, daffodils, you guys!

E explained to me that every couple of years, some master gardener comes to her offering to take it over, at which point she gives them $40 and never sees them again.

Restoring a historical herb garden at a nineteenth-century home was just entirely too much temptation for a girl whose garden consists of a strange collection of South Carolina native plants growing on a second-floor deck with northern exposure.

I went away deep in thought, conferred briefly with my partner, and came back to E:  "I'm not a master gardener, just an enthusiastic amateur, but I work Monday afternoons right across the street, and I drive in with Megan, so I have nothing to do Monday mornings.  Want me to clean that up?"

She showed me which key opened the garden shed.