The hoe in art and history

With the hoe – it seems to me – we see the start of techne. In the beginning of course was the stone, and the stick -and out of the stick grew many things : the staff, the spit, the scratcher and the spear. But join the stone to the stick and we move from tool to technology.

Larry Kinsella at FlintKnapper.com made this deerhide-wrapped hoe. With use the edges become glossy, smooth and blunt – time to nap a new sharp facet.

The Chalcolithic Age saw the arrival of copper implements, soon replaced by bronze. Egyptian heiroglyphs of the Late Bronze age [16th century BC to the 11th century BC] show the hoe for the first time in writing.

These are from Gardiner’s list of Egyptian heiroglyphs of some agricultural implements – U7, U13, U20 and 21 seem to be variants of the hoe. The hoe has entered art and history.

For more – see the hoes in art and history page, right.

Chips with Everything

It’s been 35 years since I dug my first lazy-bed. After just two years teaching in an Inner City London Comprehensive school I’d had enough: friends were dropping out, tuning in, and getting back to the land. My friends had chosen a Bally-Go-Backwards little place in mid West Cork. It was my home for a couple of years – little cottages with no running water but lots of land.

The first thing we did was get up a lazy-bed. Digging one today brought it all back. Turning in the grassy sod to the centre is the method. Pile on the manure in the middle – then cut and heave the turf-sod to cover it. It’s all pegged lines and squares of heavy grass-turf. I miss the turfing-iron we had then: it cut so sweetly. But there’s nothing lazy about it: the word may have come from ‘laissez’, or fallow pasture.

*      A      *      B      *      C      *      D      *

*              *               *              *               *

*              *               *              *               *

*              *               *              *               *

*              *               *              *               *

You spread squares B and C with manure/seaweed/compost – then fold squares A and D over onto squares B and C, grassdown. The sprouted seed-potato is inserted down the middle about a foot apart, and a few inches of soil from the A and D channels is heaped on top. More soil then is hilled up every month, plus some nutritious mulch if you have it.

It’s known as ‘run-rig’ in Scotland, and the practice was widespread throughout the northern lands, where sun was scarce and water too abundant. By breaking into grassed-over pasture, disease and blight were avoided. By hilling-up a raised ridge-bed, sun and wind were allowed in to warm and dry the bed.  By earthing-up from the channels either side of the bed, drainage and soil-tilling were achieved. It was an efficient  practice – until fashions changed in the early 18th. century, and level-beds and animal-power came to the fore.

For me it was a revelation. For the first time in my life I felt I was performing a function that fitted my body. I’m not big-built but I have big hands and a muscular body. None of this had been called on as I plodded through school and university. It was not a moment too soon: I could have lost what were actually the most precious elements of myself by staying on in teaching – become a flabby clock-watcher, with soft hands and a bad back. I’m close to 60 now, but my hands are hard and my stomach flat – and more important – I have a clear and beady eye on what is coming and what I can do about it, here and now in the garden.

Compared to flat fields, according to both researchers and farmers, the lazy beds yield more per acre with greater consistency. Lazy beds reduce gardeners’ labor time and raise the yield per acre. One year when we went to great lengths to count and weigh everything carefully, Main Brook and Conche gardeners harvested an average of 353 kilograms of potatoes from an average garden only 193 square meters in size, after investing 54-67 hours total in labor and from nothing to $78 total in cash. This yield – in a region notorious for poor farming within a province importing many of its potatoes – is more efficient with land and labor than some subsistence potato farmers elsewhere in the world. (Omohundro 1994).

Gathering winter fuel

We had our first cool evening of autumn this week, and I had to scramble around to find enough wood for the evening. Which spurred me into action on the Winter Fuel Hunt. This year I had to make enquiries about these heaps of uprooted old vines. Sadly there are all too many vignerons going bust and there’s no shortage of excellent fuel – if you can handle the dusty work of shifting a ton or so.

Past, Present and Future: Daniel, the '87 'van de pays', and the wind farm.

uprooted vines, Alaric in background

Back in 2000 we didn’t have a stove and relied on a mix of portable LP gas heaters, paraffin heaters and the judicious use of portable electric panel heaters which thanks to the special tarrif scheme we signed up for, means we get 300 days at Euro 0.05 (five centîmes ) per KWh, 43 days at E 0.10, and 22 days at 18 or 49 centîmes depending on offpeak/peak times. Our bill comes to about E 900 p.a. for the Big House (used for only 5 months a year) and the Cook’s House (where we live the year round) combined. That’s two houses – one being 20 m. by 22 m. by two floors, plus the smaller at 7m. by 7m. by two floors.

A pre-electric cutter and the last pruning for these 100-year-old vines.

Have I lost your interest yet? Oh? Ok then, let’s press on with the maths! So each floor in the Big House is 440 sq. m. – 880 sq.m. in all ( we won’t bother with the cellar or the attic which would only double this figure to 1760 sq.m. – since few people go there anymore, now that the cellar staff have left and the servants died fifty years ago . . . And then our little zone is a simple 50 sq.m. times two. Yes? At the back there? Good! 100 sq.m.!

So I make it about 1000 square yards (going off-metric for the benefit of our numerically isolationist friends across the Atlantic) of dwellings (9 bedrooms,4 bathrooms, two kitchens) – that get served with electricity every year in one form or another: hot water, ovens, cookers, hi-fi, lights, computers, TV, fans and heaters – plus the running of a 12m. by 8m. swimming pool almost all year round. That’s 9000 sq.ft. of house for 90 euros a month. Which somewhat suspiciously works out at a rather neat One Square Yard costing One Centîme (or a cent if you’d feel more comfortable – or a penny, if you’re feeling nostagic or a bit vague and alzheimerish).

three months supply of old vines in the barn

For the last few years we’ve had the Eiffel Tower in our midst. It is small and dirty and inefficient. It might serve better at smoking a row of kippers than a room of people, and demands more feeding and cleaning than a two-year-old.

Nanquette stove, and the log-box my grandfather made while the bombs fell on London c.1943

Power strimmer versus scythe

I used to love my power-strimmer. The day I bought it I considered myself finally a fully grown-up gardener. No lawn-edge would be let grow ragged, no path be spared. Dreadlocks beneath trees would get a military buzz-cut – a ‘bazzer’ in Cork slang – and anything that dared put its foot out of line would get the ’shock and awe’ treatment.
I now hate it. It does more damage to me than I can inflict on any wayward weed. A half-hour with the wailing techno-flail leaves me with ears aching and arms trembling, and back in spasms. Feet and ankles get pasted with green blood and my spirit gets clogged with disgust at the carnage. It is smelly and graceless and an abomination in the sight of nature.
But quite separately, in a distant part of my mind, an alternative device was taking shape, a different approach signalled.
If Peak Oil is the call to examine how life would be lived in the future, then all aspects of the house and garden would have to be scrutinized. I can’t remember now which website it was that led me there but just a week ago I stumbled upon this simply delightful video of a young woman scything grass. The grace of her swing, the economy of action in whetting the blade, the neat tumbling of the hay – everything proclaimed this to be so far from the horror of the petro-flail as to be of a different world. And it made the prospect of that different world of the not-so-far future, slightly less alarming – in fact possibly welcoming.

So with a little help from cuil the new search engine formed by ex-google people, I raced around the intrawebs gathering armfuls of info – see links on the right. And at last sunday’s vide-grenier (literally, empty attic meaning flea-market or carboot sale) in the nearby village of Fabrezan, I found a scythe. Now this is not so remarkable in a country that is still one of the most rural in Europe. I’ve been walking past (occasionally admiring) old tool stalls at street markets for years, and I have a dusty pile of tools in the workshop, that once belonged to my father or Mary’s. Some market stalls have impressive displays of tools lovingly refurbished, sharpened and oiled – others are scattered piles of rusty and blunt implements, heaped together with other bricabrac and obviously part of a barn-clearing exercise.
This scythe was an early european model fastened at the bottom of the snath by means of a steel collar and a wedge. The blade was long and well-used, but in good condition and remarkably sharp. It came with its own short steel anvil, stone-holder and whetstone. Fifty euros was a reasonable price considering a new tubular set from the hardware store would have been seventy, with anvil, stone and holder extra. But it was more than I wanted to spend on my first try – plus I wasn’t impressed with the straight light-pine snath and flimsy handles that he had tarted it up with. He admitted that it was more of a display object than a working scythe. So I bought a fine old olive-wood handled sickle for 18, and a little-used draw-knife for 12. We settled on 28 euros for the two of them, and we assured eachother that we’d meet again at some other street-market in some other village. I think he knows he’s found a regular.
Here’s the sickle – it’s righthanded while I am mostly sinister (that’s latin – in French it’s gaucher ). It’s sharp enough to slice a leaf in half.

sickle and draw-knife