The raspberries that grow around different places in my garden and behind my hedge are two-year varieties. First year shoots sprout from the ground and grow in height to 1-1,5 m. The second year, these shoots sprout short twigs with blossoms that bear fruit. In the fall, the whole shoot dies and dries over winter. The growth can become pretty overcrowded and inaccessible if these dead shoots are not removed. It was difficult to remove them without trampling some of the one-year shoots that will bear fruit any given year, so this spring I thought about it a bit. I decided to make a new tool specifically for this task, thus I took an angle grinder, hammer, and forge to an old shovel (first used to make a rondel dagger accessories back in the day) and I carved, forged, and ground a small-ish bill hook. I sharpened the inner side of the curve as well as the forward-facing one, and I affixed it to an approximately 1 m long handle. I can grab the dead shoots, and cut them off at or near the ground level without bending down and without going into the growth and damaging it.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Today, I was facing the problem of fast-growing weeds (mainly Veronica chamaedrys) among my onions that I could not remove with any tool currently at my disposal, and that would be too onerous and time-consuming to pull manually. I still had a bit of the old shovel left, so I cut an outline of the tool and heated up the forge again. It is a sort of tiny mini-shovel, just 5 cm wide and with a sharpened V-cut in the face. It too has an approx 1 m long handle and I can carefully push it between the rows of onions, cutting the weeds several mm under the surface without damaging the crop. The weeds will dry and die and eventually decompose. It is not 100% weed removal, but it did allow me to undercut most of the weeds in all of my onion patches in under an hour, and that is a definitive success. Veronica chamaedrys is impossible to remove once established, so I am not even trying anymore. I only do my best to suppress it enough so it does not choke out the crops.