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!