Product Review: The Pointed Stick

The Pointed Stick

I supposed I should urge you all to go buy shiny newfangled garden tools in order to jump start the economy and encourage new advertisers to flock to my blog.  But that would be progress, and I'm agin' it.  Kind of ironic for someone who ran for Attorney General as a Progressive, eh?

But before I get distracted by discussion of Vermont politics, I would like to introduce you to the garden tool I rely on about 75% of the time. I refer to it as a Pointed Stick. Actually it's a double-pointed stick, with a pointy broken-off wooden handle at one end and an arrow-shaped pointy metal bit at the other.

The implement is also known as a Warren hoe, and would be a long-handled Warren hoe but for the fact that the handle broke at least 20 years ago, back when the handle also used to sport barn-red paint. To my way of thinking, the broken handle was actually an improvement. The thing broke right at the perfect length for me to grasp as comfortably as a baseball player might grab the end of a wooden bat in one hand to swing it while stretching out his or her arms, or the way a fishing-person might grab a rod, or a tennis player their racket. In other words, it fits.

In addition to hanging on to that short wooden handle, I flip the thing over and use it as a dibble--the pointy thing to poke holes in the ground to plant bulbs, or transplant plugs. Handy.

The more conventional business end rakes a nice furrow through the ground, from a tiny drill for lettuce if I press lightly, to a wide trough for transplanting big stuff if I bury it up to the hilt.

Held tilted to the side, the long flat blade edge makes a perfectly good imitation of a flat-bladed hoe for weeding or pulling dirt back over the just-planted trough. 

The other 25% of the time that I'm not using the Pointed Stick, I'm using a shovel 10% of the time, a bar rake 10% of the time, a spading fork 2.5% of the time... and an actual pointed stick the remaining 2.5% of the time, when I can't lay my hands on THE Pointed Stick. That's when I'm using a tool at all other than my hands, of course.

I guess that does not help you with your tool shopping much... but sometimes less is more. Personally, I'm wicked impressed that I've managed to not lose the Pointed Stick for over 20 years of gardening. I guess I'll just have to think up other ways to jumpstart the economy besides buying new gardening tools...